Initially populated with IBM's 500 pledged software patents, PatentCafe today announced the opening of its Open Source Software (OSS) Patent Search Engine™ devoted entirely to worldwide search access to OSS patents. Now, through PatentCafe's new OSS Patent Search Engine software developers can search this important collection of OSS patents, and find the patents most related to their software projects.

On January 11, 2005, International Business Machines (IBM) pledged open access to key innovations covered by 500 IBM software patents to people and groups working on open source software that meet the Open Source Initiative. This means that qualifying software developers can now develop their OSS software without fear of IBM asserting these patents against them.

According to PatentCafe CEO Andy Gibbs, as important as IBM's patent contribution is to the Open Source Software community, the profound economic and product impact on the software industry will be realized when OSS developers begin delivering programs built on IBM's patents. First, they must identify the single best patent to use for their software programs. Smart searching further helps establish the Freedom to Operate for their own OSS based software innovations. That's where the PatentCafe OSS Patent Search Engine™ comes into play.

The Benefits of PatentCafe's Patent Search Engine:

Because of the complexity of patent documents, searching patents has historically been the domain of skilled patent searchers. The OSS Patent Search Engine is a vital component to making software patents accessible to software developers since searchers can use natural language search queries, then rely on the advanced search engine technology to create a hierarchical list of the most relevant patents.

Freely accessible by the entire OSS community, PatentCafe's Patent Search Engine adds significant commercial value to IBM's contribution by accelerating the integration of IBM's patented technology into the marketplace, helping to foster worldwide interoperability standards.

By adding IBM's 500 pledged patents to one of the world's largest international patent databases, PatentCafe makes the entire collection accessible using natural language search queries that describe the concept of the software functions they are looking for. By comparison, the US Patent & Trademark Office's search engine can only return patents that literally match a few keywords used in the search query.

Gibbs likens finding the best IBM patent to vitamin shopping online: "Think of it as someone who needs to find the most effective vitamin from 500 different brands they would need to read the label on every brand. PatentCafe's semantic analysis search engine actually understands the concepts of all 500 patents, and can identify the most relevant IBM patents in only seconds."

Many software terms and industry jargon change over time, making patents very difficult to find if the searcher uses keywords that don't exactly match words contained in the older patents. For instance, the term "business method" was not a widely used term found in patents during the early 1990s. Searching for "business method" will therefore miss many applicable patents that don't contain those words.

PatentCafe's Latent Semantic Analysis engine employs a novel Concept Space, or "patent-smart" neural net that the computer has created by 'learning' the concepts during the indexing of more than 23 million patents, currently one of the world's largest patent databases.

"Being able to instantly search the entire collection of 500 patents using Semantic Analysis technology means that software developers with little patent searching expertise can become expert patent searchers," says Gibbs. "They can copy in a search query containing a 100 word functional software specification and instantly retrieve a relevancy-ranked list of the most appropriate IBM patents - something no legacy patent search engine will allow".

Developers still need to remain vigilant even if using the information in a pledged IBM patent. Their software programs written to take advantage of the "safe harbor" of an IBM pledged patent could still be found to infringe a different company's patent.

Developers can freely search the full text of the 500 OSS patent collection. A CD ROM containing all 500 patents in PDF format is also available online for a nominal fee.

Will PatentCafe's OSS Patent Search Engine ever contain more than IBM's 500 patents? Gibbs only says: "IBM Primed the pump; time will tell whether it leads to a flood".