Towards the end of the week I will be blogging live from the Information Retrieval Facility Symposium (IRFS). This year the meeting will be held in (what I am told) is the very fair city of Vienna.

Billed as a convention where “Science meets Business” the experts in attendance will attempt to hammer out how best to handle the vital retrieval of digital patent information as well as its storage.

The organisers say that as the field of Information Retrieval is at such an experimental phase, this will be the driving force behind the conference sessions.

The two-day event will be split into five sessions and a series of working groups. Kicking off on opening day will be the Data Quality session with speakers from GlaxoSmithKline and the Royal School of Library and Information Science.

Session 2 will focus on Language gaps in the Information Retrieval world. Particularly in relation to original Chinese and Korean documents

Session 3 is entitled Corpus Enrichment, or rather how technology can be utilised to recognise and extract the implicit information in a document. This can include the difference between preamble, a detailed description, claims made in a patent document or alternate examples. 

Sessions 4 and 5 will examine the related tools available for information professionals and management and research respectively.

I will be covering the significant areas, developments and intellectual jousting that will be going on as soon as doors open on Thursday morning and close Friday evening.

* A full analysis on the future of patent search technology will feature in December’s issue of IWR.