Hi, you recently added some content to freebase about Kurt Godel's death. We are investigating some problems that this caused in our UI (because of non-english characters in the name) - can you help us by pointing out how you added this content (i.e. what did you do on the site?
Thanks a lot!
Michael
Hi, I'm a little confused by your Color topic Scarlet and black. To me that's two colors, scarlet, and black, both of which we already have. Am I missing something?
Martin asked me to put 2 cents in. First, the definition here is from Wikopedia. NOT. It should be from the WPO or USPTO. This highlights the problem of relying on Wikopedia as anything but a starting point.There are precise legal defintions and this aint one so it heads off in the wrong direction, for example by saying "or industrially useful." Huh? Never learned that one in law school. Very misleading. Something can be industrially useful and not patentable. Second, on Martin's search structure claims are missing and all that counts in a patent is the claims. The rest is boilerplate or a way to find it via a unique identifier, (e.g. number). After claims, I would include class as that is the bundle against which a patent is evaluated. Put in a different class and it may not seem as novel or more so. Martin has that in there. Finally, be clear are you doing US only or global.
Regarding Patent References, I could see an that argument the reference be to the Patent, rather than the Patent Number. On the other hand, this is an unusual case, because the numbers are usually used as the names of the patent, rather than the title. I see why you did this the way you did. Another option would be to make the patent number and an alias of the name or even the name. I am not sure yet how to best solve this yet.
Patent names are an interesting puzzle. In almost all cases, even in conversation, patents are referred to by number not title. Titles are not unique and are more like short descriptions. Patents only refer to other patents by number, so most lawyers you don't even know the title. All this is starting to sound like the number its the name, especially if we adopt the international convention most countries affixing a two-letter to the numbers to identify the country ie: US6309467, JP11168076-A, DE19741465-A1, EP905796-B1 etc.
What do you think about this?
That makes eminent sense, if the title qualifies the number for display purposes.
There's another interesting use case: lawyers often refer to a patent by a partial number, if it's frequently cited or critical to a given litigation. For example, I worked on this case (for Rockwell):
The suit alleges infringement of United States Patent 5,038,318 entitled “Device For Communicating Real Time Data Between A Programmable Logic Controller And A Program Operating In A Central Controller” (the ‘318 patent).
It would be useful if we could automatically generate an alias to US5038318 of '318. It would also be useful if the system recognized patent numbers with and without commas.
I combined some elements of your definition of patent with others, and put them into the new law domain. You can find it by searching for "patent'. Let me know what you think.
Seems like there may be a search bug - I could only find it by searching on 'US patent' -- which gets you here... http://www.freebase.com/view/filter?id=/law/us_patent
I buy most of the design of the /law/us_patent/ type, in principle.
Making the Inventor property of type Person is a mistake, in my opinion. Person is just too big a category for effective dropdowns. I expect to see Alexander Graham Bell in the Inventors dropdown if I type "Bell," but not St. Robert Bellarmine. That's why I created a Person/Inventor type in my private implementation.
The key to making the type useful will be to bulk load from the USPTO database, with the abstract as the description, and the USPTO full text URL as the web link.
Also, another reason for a separate Inventor type is that you can create n:m relationships between inventors and patents. Ditto for assignees. These are very valuable when you're researching a field.
EG: Search patents for "parallel computer". Look at the assignees. Aha, that's who's in the field! What other patents do those Thinking Machines guys have?
Another relationship I've been thinking is citations. Patents always reference other patents, and that's valuable.
Now I remember: I did implement citations. It's the References property of Patent Number.
See http://www.freebase.com/view/schema?id=%2Fuser%2Fmheller%2Fdefault_domain%2Fpatent_number
I have to say that I'm thinking in terms of a future application with a richer UI. A lot of this won't come across too well with the current standard Freebase interface. Look at Delphion for examples of what can be done with Patent data.
