Dr. Richard
G. Cooper
Home | About | Resume | Elk for Patents | Contact
Providing Expert Witness Services in
Software, Internet and Electronics Technologies
Getting Started
The About tab is initially presented. Note the email address MetaSemantics@EnglishLogicKernel.com
which is for your use in communicating with MetaSemantics for any
questions, technical support, or other needs you may have for
information.
The Search tab is used
for two purposes. You can
search for an otherwise unknown patent or group of patents using a variety
of keyword and category search techniques, or you
can search for possible prior art
patents given a starting patent identifier.
At the top left, the directory box allows you to organize each project into a single folder to help keep all information together:
The edit box accepts a patent number, which you can type in and then click on, or which you can select from the drop down list, which is shown below:
You can display a patent in one of two ways. You can type the number into the edit box and click on Load Patent File, or you can select a patent number in the dropdown box, which will automatically bring up the patent with the selected number. If the patent with the number you type or select hasn't already been downloaded, you will be asked if you want to download it. Choosing OK will download the patent in seconds.
The drop down list shows patent files that have been
previously downloaded from the USPTO web site by one of Elk’s utility
programs - "Download Patents
".
You can find out more about that later in this documentation, but
for now we’ll assume a list is available to you for observation.
Alternatively, you can create your own list using Notepad, with one patent number per line, and store it in the same directory as a *.txt file. Right click on the drop down list to bring up a popup menu:
Choosing Load Search
List .. will allow you to steer to a
specific *.txt file prepared in that format, and use it as your search
list. Choosing Save Search
List .. will let you save the current
list to a text file for later reuse.
When you specify a patent by typing it into the box or by selecting one from the list, Elk retrieves the patent text and divides it into five additional tabs (Patent,Data,Abstract,Claims,Description) with thePatent tab shown in the example below. Note also that the Analyze panel is presented with a list of frequent words and an empty list of rare words:
If you choose theAbstract tab, the abstract section of the patent is displayed as shown in the example below:
Choosing theClaims tab displays a suite of tools for analyzing claim language as shown below. The claims are organized into a tree of independent and dependent claims displayed in tree form at the bottom left of the image:
Clicking on Claims will select all of the claims, putting them into
the Selected
Claim area. Left clicking on an individual claim,
such as claim 1
, will put only the clicked claim into the
Selected
Claim area. More description about the tool suite
for claim analysis can be found in the Claim
Analysis
section of the
help files.
Choosing theDescription tab presents the description section extracted from the patent, as shown in the example below:
The site is fully
operational, and you can use other PTO services by clicking on the labels
as appropriate. For example,
you can view each figure if you have installed a TIFF viewer, as described
on the USPTO web site.
Normally, you will probably prefer to have the “Show Images” checkbox turned off to improve response times, but at times, having the images immediately available is worth the delay.
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