PerFedPat: An integrated federated system for patent search

• Concept of federated search systems applied in the patent search field.
• Multiple online patent search sources accessed through common single search query tool.
• Multiple additional search tools can be integrated, eg IPC, MT, results prioritization.

We present PerFedPat, an interactive patent search system based on the federated search approach and the ezDL framework. PerFedPat provides core services to search, using a federated method, multiple online patent resources (currently Espacenet, Google patents, Patentscope and the MAREC collection), thus providing parallel access to multiple patent sources. PerFedPat hides complexity from the end user who uses a common single query tool for querying all patent datasets at the same time. PerFedPat provides cores services such as Boolean and fielded search, merging, grouping and filtering of results, and offers support for query history and search sessions. The second innovative feature of PerFedPat is that it has a pluggable and extensible architecture and it enables the use of multiple search tools which are integrated in PerFedPat. Currently tools are integrated for IPC classification search, faceted navigation, clustering of search results and machine translation of queries. As a result the system is able to provide a rich, personalized information seeking experience for different types of patent searches, potentially exploiting techniques from diverse areas such as distributed information retrieval, semantic search, machine learning and human–computer interaction. The system is available for download from the internet.