Patent Office starts testing paperless processing system

Computerworld - The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last week began testing an all-electronic patent and trademark-processing system that's expected to cost the agency more than $50 million to develop and is scheduled be fully implemented by late 2004.

The patent office, which is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, estimated that the system will generate an annual return on investment of 30% during the first five years of use, due partly to technology upgrades aimed at eliminating more than a half-million paper files each year.

Last spring, the agency said it planned to be able to process all trademark applications electronically by next October and to have a similar process in place for patent filings a year later (see story). But it didn't disclose details about the technology it will use to support the paperless processing.

CIO Doug Bourgeois last week said the patent office had started running the system in pilot mode to process requests for patents related to the arts. The test phase is due to continue until March, he said. If all goes according to plan, production deployment will begin next June.

The Patent and Trademark Office plans to use IBM's WebSphere MQ middleware tools as an enterprise application integration hub, which will use XML to connect new document-scanning and archiving software to the agency's back-end processing system, Bourgeois said.

Applications for patents and trademarks will be sent to the integration hub, which will convert the data into a format that can be understood by the homegrown back-end system. That system was originally developed for a Unisys Corp. mainframe and was migrated to five Hewlett-Packard Co. Unix servers last year.

The document-scanning system is a modified version of an application called ePhoenix, which was developed by the European Patent Office in Munich, Germany. The software runs on an Oracle9i database and will be used to capture images of patent and trademark applications as well as follow-up communications and filings, Bourgeois said.

"We'll have an image of every piece of paper we receive," he said. The data will be indexed, and Bourgeois noted that ePhoenix includes workflow capabilities that can route filings to the next person in the application-processing chain.

Room to Grow

To help deal with the increased amount of data that it will be collecting, the Patent and Trademark Office is installing an additional 90TB of Symmetrix disk arrays from EMC Corp. on top of the 210TB it already has configured on a storage-area network. Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC plans to announce the new purchase this week.

The migration to full electronic processing will make the agency's data backup and disaster recovery capabilities more important than they are now, Bourgeois said. The patent office currently has a stand-alone data center and does only tape backups of its mission-critical data. If systems were to crash, it would take "a long time to get back to business," Bourgeois said.