Circulation of Collective Intelligence through Patents: An Early Progress Report

Patent applicants and/or examiners could annotate patent documents in terms of correspondences between claims and their working examples. Those annotations would make it easier to understand the documents so as to improve the quality of collaboration among inventors, patent attorneys, examiners, and users of technologies. Annotations to a patent document would also be used to generate queries for retrieving similar past documents, and annotations to past documents should raise the accuracy of retrieval. Domain ontologies could be generated from such annotations and queries, then in turn used to generate new annotations and queries, and so forth. Human collective intelligence would be circulated through this spiral generation of annotations, queries, and ontologies, continuously improving the productivity of application, examination, and use of patents. The paper reports on an early stage of research to realize this vision.