Hi Nick, Thanks for the response to this inquiry and your suggestions. What I hear described is a web service approach that would handle the storage of comments and metadata in a way that is modular and logically separated from the application that uses the data. One could imagine that our application is a subscriber to that service, and that other applications such as 3rd party software could also subscribe to the service. If well-designed it could be extensible to other types of metadata, but our initial focus would be on comments, claim rankings and prior art references. It does seem that if we are capturing comments and prior art, one could open it up so that others can subscribe to that information. It sounds powerful, but I am wondering whether this is something that has to be built from scratch, or we can build off some framework to get this functionality. My understanding is that Kowari is designed for this. Other areas we would have to look at are user identity management and how the ratings and rankings mechanism is related to the metadata service. The Open Source As Prior Art has also been exploring how metadata can be organized (see http://osapa.org/wiki/index.php/OSSTag). The PLOS TOPAZ effort may soon have some of these features also but I am wondering if there are other frameworks that we could build from. Is there any code framework that covers this type of functionality? Is using Kowari an approach of interest for the purposes you describe? Sincerely, Eric Hestenes Technical Lead NYLS Community Patent Review project Nick dos Remedios <nick at cambia.org> wrote: On 30/10/2006, at 3:56 PM, Eric Hestenes wrote: It would be interesting to hear if anyone in the developer community has ideas or thoughts on this subject. One idea I have, is for sites such as patent database providers (I work at CAMBIA, which provides a free full text patent search - http://www.patentlens.net/) to collect comments and peer reviews of patents and then share/publish these "comments" with any other interested parties (other patent informatics sites, etc) via a centrally administered web services server (OSDL?). So, instead of relying on a single site to be the point of contact for submission of patent reviews and prior art, etc, many sites, with different user foci, could contribute to the effort. Bloggers could incorporate the web service just as easily as patent database providers. For this to work, the web services schema would have to be flexible enough to allow comments from a range of user perspectives (software patents, life science patents, engineering patents, etc), while still enforcing a degree of strictness necessary for proper prior art documentation. We have ideas about also gathering information that falls outside the specs of the P2P project, such as users sharing information on licensing of particular patents as well as general comments about the technical issues relating to the practice a given patented invention. It has the drawback adding complexity and thus slowing the process. If too many players try to influence the schema/functionality then it could degrade into a lowest common denominator spec that is impractical to actually implement. It would be up to each site as to how to collect and display this data. However I would expect there to be a collaboratively developed prototype web client that could be used as a starting point as well as providing a way for bug fixes to be shared. This would not be limited to patent database sites as it is now fairly easy to access the EPO OPS web service (http://ops.espacenet.com/) to GET patent data for a given patent number (their DocDB database has all jurisdictions: front page data, family data and legal status) using a SOAP client. The above mentioned web service could even provide this data itself! Another idea is for the comment collection and publishing to come from a single source but for other sites to be able to provide access to this service via a simple iframe. The iframe would display existing comments for that patent (by passing a patent doc ID) and would also allow the user to add comments to that patent. There may be technical problems with this idea due to authentication, etc. and its really only an idea off the top of my head right now. Anyway, thats my Monday morning babble... I hope it makes sense. Nick ---- Nick dos Remedios, PhD CAMBIA <http://www.cambia.org/> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.osdl.org/pipermail/p2patent-developer/attachments/20061030/c678c08d/attachment.htm
