Survey on the Implementation and Promotion of WIPO Standard ST.22

Response submitted by Russian Federation in 2011

The present questionnaire addresses issues concerning WIPO Standard ST.22 (Recommendation for the authoring of patent applications for the purpose of facilitating optical character recognition (OCR)) and patent applications submitted on paper or submitted electronically (e-filed) but having the text body of the application submitted in image form (e.g., PDF or TIFF images). Even if your Office does not perform OCR on its documents, please respond to the questions which are applicable.

A revised version of WIPO Standard ST.22 was adopted by the Standards and Documentation Working Group (SDWG) on November 21, 2008. It is available at: https://www.wipo.int/standards/en/pdf/03-22-01.pdf

The results of the survey will be presented for consideration by the Committee on WIPO Standards (CWS).

Please take note that some questions might not be displayed depending on the response(s) to preceding question(s). This could cause gaps in numbering of displayed questions and sections.

Section 1: Patent filing in your Office

1. Does your Office accept patent applications submitted on paper or submitted electronically but having the text body of the application submitted in image form (e.g., PDF or TIFF images)?

Yes

Please comment if necessary:

All applications filed with ROSPATENT (except filed on-line), even those that are presented on machine-readable carrier, should also be submitted on paper.

2. If applicable, please indicate the percentage, with respect to the total number of applications received by your Office, and the year of reference (e.g., 60% in 2008), of the following

3. Does your Office perform optical character recognition (OCR) on patent applications?

Yes

Please comment if necessary:

About 2-3% of all applications (from second part of 2010 to present) are filed on-line and are not OCR-ed.

Section 2: Promotion and use of WIPO Standard ST.22

4. Has your Office adapted the filing guidance that it provides to applicants to take into account the recommendations of the revised version of WIPO Standard ST.22?

Partially

Please comment if necessary:

Part of the Office Administrative Regulations containing requirements to the filing of applications has been published simultaneously with the adoption of the revised ST.22. That is why our Office filing guidance does not provide for all ST.22 requirements. Our Office is interested to implement almost all ST.22 requirements. However, the dead line for this implementation has not been established yet.

5. Has your Office promoted the use by applicants of the recommendations provided by WIPO Standard ST.22?

Partially

Please comment if necessary:

The information concerning revision and adoption of ST.22 has been published.
ST.22 recommendations relating to the paper quality, application pages and table layout coincide with the requirements of the ROSPATENT Administrative Regulations.

6. If applicable, what publication means has your Office used to promote the use of WIPO Standard ST.22 (e.g., article in the official gazette, amendment of Office's filing recommendations, publication on the Office's website, newsletters)?

Please specify the details (e.g., entry or section of the official gazette, URL of the location where the announcement is available):

This information has been published on the Office web-site in April 2009 ((http://www1.fips.ru/wps/wcm/connect/content_ru/ru/news/?WCM_PI=1&WCM_PI=1&WCM_Page.2528ee804b1fa18289f9bbd694914a01=49 - notice concerned ST.22 publication 07.04.2009 and http://www.rupto.ru/norm_doc/sod/norm_doc/st_vois/03_22_01.pdf)) - ST.22 itself and in the special magazine "Patent Information Today" № 3/2009.

7. Has your Office promoted WIPO Standard ST.22 in any other way (e.g., conferences, information circulars)?

Yes

Please describe how:

At the moment ROSPATENT is in the process of revision of the Office Administrative Regulations in order to bring them into accordance with the ST.22 recommendations.

Section 3: Implementation of WIPO Standard ST.22

This Section 3 refers to the applications that are filed on paper or electronically (e-filed) but having the text body of the application submitted in image form (e.g., PDF or TIFF images).

8. Has your Office noticed any improvement in the quality of the formal presentation and layout of the applications that follow the recommendations of WIPO Standard ST.22?

Noticeable improvement

Please comment if necessary:

We believe that these improvements have been caused rather by common applicant computerization than by implementation of new Office Administrative Regulations or ST.22, as the requirements for the paper quality and application layout have not been changed at least for the last ten years.

9. Has your Office noticed any improvement in the OCR quality output that resulted from the applicants' awareness of WIPO Standard ST.22?

No improvement

Please comment if necessary:

The quality of our Office OCR rather depends on internal OCR work procedures and equipment.
Only Office Administrative Regulations requirements are obligatory to RU applicants, and we have no information whether they are aware of ST.22 recommendations.

10. Has your Office noticed any decrease in the OCR costs that have resulted from the applicants' awareness of WIPO Standard ST.22?

No decrease

Please comment if necessary:

See answer for point 9.

11. Does your Office use the non-conformity to WIPO Standard ST.22 as a reason to request replacement sheets of the application?

No

Please comment if necessary:

The replacement of application sheets is requested in case of non-conformity to the application layout requirements stated in the Administrative Regulations that coincide with ST.22 only partly.

12. If applicable, please indicate the percentage of applications for which replacement sheets are requested with respect to the total number of applications (filed on paper or e-filed) having the text body of the application submitted in image form, and the period of time of reference:

(e.g., 15% in the first half of 2009)

13. Does your Office have the intention to take into account, for the calculation of fees, the level of compliance with WIPO Standard ST.22 of the applications filed on paper or e-filed but having the text body of the application submitted in image form?

No

If applicable, please explain how:

Section 4: OCR practices of IPOs

14. Since your answer to Question 3 was"Yes", please indicate if the following purposes are applicable and, if"Yes", the accuracy requirements established by your Office:

a) Security screening of patent applications

Yes

Accuracy requirements:

There are no fixed accuracy requirements

b) Publication of the patent applications

Yes

Accuracy requirements:

There are no fixed accuracy requirements

c) Publication of the granted patents

Yes

Accuracy requirements:

There are no fixed accuracy requirements

d) Please indicate other purpose(s) and corresponding accuracy requirements if necessary:

Indexing for loading into internal search patent database. There are no fixed accuracy requirements.

15. Does your Office have in-house quality checking measures in place to control the quality of the OCRed patent documents?

Yes

Please provide a concise description of the measures (e.g., refer to the relative automation of the quality checking indicating if it comprises the review by staff of randomly selected output, and/or if it is based on the accuracy confidence metrics produced by the OCR software):

MS Word macros for checking and setting of uniform format, orthographic checking, checking of Latin and Cyrillic symbols medley presence.
Part of ROSPATENT staff carries out checking of OCR results by comparing with paper originals. Operators and editors check 100% of OCR-ed documents.

16. Does your Office OCR patent documents in foreign languages?

Yes

Please indicate which foreign language(s):

In English

17. Does your Office outsource the OCR of patent documents?

No

18. If you answered"Yes" to the previous Question:

(a) If applicable, please indicate any comments or feedback that your Office might have received from the contractor about the recommendations of WIPO Standard ST.22:

(b) Please also describe the quality checking measures used to control the quality of the OCRed patent documents that are performed by your contractor:

(c) Since your answer to Questions 4, 8 or 13 was"Yes", please indicate whether your Office has renegotiated, or intends to renegotiate, the service contract with its contractor as a consequence of the adoption of the revised version of WIPO Standard ST.22 by the Standards and Documentation Working Group (SDWG) on November 21, 2008:

Section 5: Software and hardware used to OCR

19. What software tools does your Office, or its contractor, use to perform the OCR of patent documents?

ABBYY Fine Reader 9.0

20. Has your Office, or its contractor, developed OCR software extensions specific to patent documents?

No

21. What hardware does your Office, or its contractor, use to perform the OCR of patent documents?

PC HP 3GHz

Please comment if necessary:

Documents scanned with Kodak i620 Scanner and Fujitsu fi-5750C hardware go for OCR procedure.

Section 6: Workflow

22. Please describe the workflow for the OCR of your patent documents:

OCR is carried out by software ABBYY Fine Reader 9.0. Before the OCR process, scanned document pages are divided for blocks: text, tables or images. OCR-ed text is corrected by operator. Pages are saved in MS Word as file of rtf format. Each file is named according to the type of application part - abstract, description, claims. Then the text is formatted in MS Word. Mathematic and physical formulas are put in the text as image objects by formula editor Microsoft Equation. Chemical formulas are put as objects by software ISIS Draw.

23. Does your Office itself check the quality of its OCRed patent documents?

Yes

Please provide a concise description of how the quality check is carried out:

100% of documents are checked by ROSPATENT staff (see answer for p.15), which carries out OCR results reviewing them for compliance with paper originals. In case there is any incomprehensibility, they ask for the help of examiners or electronic application file.

24. Please describe how your Office handles patent documents found to be defective later in the process (e.g., after publication):

If some defects were determined after publication, the respective notification is published in the latest Official Bulletin and in the"Opened Registries" on the Office web-site. If there are many errors in one document it is re-issued.

25. Please provide a concise response to the following issues concerning the storage of OCRed patent documents:

(a) Format(s) in which your Office stores the OCRed patent documents:

Ms Word (doc, rtf), tiff

(b) Does the storage format(s) used by your Office allow for later quality improvements either by your Office or by external contractors?

Yes

(c) Does the storage format used by your Office allow for quick identification of patent documents with OCR defects?

Yes

(d) Does the storage format used by your Office allow for different renditions to view or exchange the OCRed patent documents (e.g., PDF, HTML)?

Yes

(e) Does the storage format used by your Office retain all the raw detailed information obtained from the OCR process (e.g., individual character accuracy estimation, position in image, etc.)?

No

(f) Does the storage format used by your Office capture, in text format, table contents, and mathematical and chemical formulae?

Yes

26. Is the OCR of patent documents also used to increase the efficiency of the work of the Office, (e.g., bibliographic data input from paper applications can be considerably speeded up with accurate OCR)?

No

27. Does your Office OCR documents other than patent documents?

Yes

Please indicate which documents:

In some cases, except applications for patents (inventions, utility models, designs) and trademarks, OCR can be done for special non-patent documents (e.g. books, journals or legislative documents) according to ROSPATENT specialists' requests.

28. If it is known by your Office, please provide a description of the usages by your customers of the documents OCRed by your Office (e.g., internal office patent application searches by examiners, Internet patent application searches by the public, electronic products sold to private subscribers, etc.):

Documents OCR-ed by the Office are used for internal office patent application searches carried by examiners (OCR-ed documents are included in to the Office patent DBs) and Internet patent application searches carried by the general public, as well as in the electronic products sold to private subscribers and some hosts.

29. Does your Office use OCRed patent documents provided by other offices?

Yes

Please indicate from which office(s) and for which documents, formats and purposes:

Part of patent documents of foreign Patent Offices loaded into ROSPATENT internal search DB are OCR-ed. Such documents exist in the files of different countries (usually we use documents of"PCT minimum").

Section 7: Additional comments

30. Please provide further comments regarding the implementation and promotion of WIPO Standard ST.22, as well as OCR practices of your Office, if you feel it is necessary:

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