XLUS

XLUS (pronounced kailas) presents patent information in such a way as to facilitate evaluation of technological strengths and weaknesses of each company.

XLUS includes four kinds of ASP services. “XLUS Green” and “XLUS White” handle Japanese published patent applications. “XLUS Eagle G” and “XLUS Eagle W” deal with the U.S. patents.

No special skills required

An interface screen of “XLUS Eagle G”is shown below. Any idea may be input into the query box in the form of natural language sentences. Alternatively, a user may copy and paste text data from other sources including academic papers and websites of other companies. One hundred relevant patents will be retrieved immediately. XLUS does not necessarily require a user to prepare a search formula. Therefore, even without much knowledge of the technology to be searched, retrievals and screening analyses can be conducted.

One U.S. patent attorney suggests, “XLUS has great potential for improving search productivity. Usually, searches are outsourced to search firms. With XLUS, patent law firms can internally conduct some of such search duties. Also, I feel that search firms in the U.S. should install XLUS and heavily utilize it.”

Can be used by anyone

In addition to researchers and patent analysts, people who are in charge of planning management strategy or marketing strategy can become potential users of such patent information. Furthermore, analysts in financial institutes and investment companies can take such information into account when conducting enterprise valuations and product/service evaluations.

Intuitively understandable – Radar chart

One of the core technologies of SO-TI resides in the original way in which search results are presented. In order to illustrate the similarity and technological relationships among patents, XLUS produces a radar chart. The distances between dots indicate the degree of similarity. The radar charts of XLUS allow a user to obtain a panoramic view of retrieved patents and provide extensive information that is intuitively understandable.

Compatible with information explosion

In order to search for relevant patents, XLUS utilizes a scheme called “tf-idf.” Using this scheme, the similarity between documents is calculated. The recent introduction of parallel computing technology has enabled XLUS to perform tremendous quantities of calculations within a few seconds. More than forty million words including compound terms appearing in all United States Patents are utilized in the retrieval. The accuracy of the search is ensured even if the number of patents to be retrieved continues to increase.

Powerful tool for patent landscape search and state-of-the-art search

It takes much effort and time to conduct a patent landscape search and a state-of-the-art search, which are important for determining the direction of research activities. Most of the time is spent reading the retrieved documents to categorize them. Such human-based categorization tends to be subjective, and the output varies depending on the skill of the individual. In contrast, “XLUS Eagle W” electronically categorizes thousands of patents into clusters and places clusters that are similar to each other in the same area. Thus, an objective output can be obtained very quickly.

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