| Monty Hyams (1918-2013): Patent Information Pioneer | home | intro | derwent | personal | downloads | links |
Derwent
data scores for longevity, subject-scope and global range. But at least
as prized is the value added to the public domain information
by a team of specialist abstractors and indexers. All of the following
originated under Monty's leadership (1951-84) in the first two cases
initiated by him in person.
Enhanced titles:
Right from the start, Monty improved on the often vague and unhelpful
titles of the original documents, so as to make them more easy to scan
and comprehend. This developed over time into two-part titles: first
describing the invention, then its novelty. For example: Oil sealed pump for gas circuit
of gas laser – pumps gas through catalytic converter and oil filter
associated with pump to remove oil from gas flow.
Informative abstracts: Monty's
original selling point was concise summaries in language as plain as
the technical content would permit. This was hugely useful in an era
when access to the original document typically took days. Now that
full-text is rapidly available online but there is so much of it,
informative abstracts valuably reduce 'information overload.' "To this
day," an independent reviewer has suggested, "the shorter, yet more
precise excerpts written by human indexers to clarify patent content
may still yield important prior art that would never have been found
using the same keywords in a full text database."
Subject indexing: During
the period 1963-80, Derwent's work expanded to cover the range of
science and technology visible here. A proprietary coding system
was established on a hierarchical basis so that searches could be made
at different levels of specificity. Around 17,000 indexing terms arose
within the chemical and electrical realms. "Derwent Manual
Codes are assigned by a small, highly trained pool of Thomson
employees, whereas IPC codes are assigned by staff with variable levels
of expertise and training in patent offices around the world," is how that
same reviewer puts it.
Coding of chemical
structures: The Derwent Fragmentation Code was instituted
with Farmdoc in 1963, to describe both specific and generic chemical
compounds disclosed in the patent documents. Users could
eventually search for any of approximately 2,2000 numerical codes
corresponding to a structure fragment. The prime mover on this
extremely important aspect of Derwent's work was Peter Norton,
who remained the lead during subsequent iterations of chemical
coding.
Patent family
enhancement: Specialist indexers group patent documents
into Derwent 'families' based on related content, "thereby
de-duplicating the searching effort while ensuring that no distantly
related patents are accidentally lumped together in a single family".
From the outset the way this was achieved differed from the more
rudimentary and automated methods of other patent databases.
Examples and quotations have been taken from the 2010 in-depth review
of DWPI by Intellogist.
In summary:
All of these value-added aspects arose in Monty's era. Via specialist online services, they enabled sophisticated searching both of DWPI alone and on a 'cross-file' basis of databases from elsewhere. Then, after Monty's time, they underpinned integration with other Thomson Reuters sources using a Web
front-end.
| contact |