1. e-PEC – Electronic Platform for
Collaborative Examination
VIII LATIPAT Reunion - 05 to 07 November 2012
INPI (Instituto Nacional da Propriedade Industrial)

2. Index
 Introduction
 Objectives
 Premises
 Functionalities
 Workflow
 Results
 Conclusions
 Next steps

3. Introduction
 PROSUR
 A South-South cooperation project
 Integration and cooperation project involving south
american countries
 Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuator, Paraguay, Peru,
Surinam and Uruguay
 Main objective is the effective operational cooperation
among the governmental industrial property offices in
the region, with support from the Fund for Regional
Public Goods (BPR) of the Interamerican Development
Bank (IDB)

4. Introduction
 PROSUR
 Main deliverables
 Implementation and development of a common electronic platform
 IP offices database integration
 Common portal
 Administrative and financial sustainability of the project, including
its institutionalization
 Project structure
 Directive Committee
 Technical Committee
 Manager
 Executive secretary
 Technical consultants

5. Introduction
e-PEC
Electronic Platform for
Collaborative Examination
http://epec.inpi.gov.br

6. Introduction
 Growing worldwide increase in number and
complexity of patent applications
 Backlog
 Decreasing analysis quality
 Intellectual property offices groups
 IP5 – EPO, USPTO, JPO, CIPO and KIPO
 Vancouver Group – UKIPO, IPAustralia, CIPO
 PROSUR – Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuator,
Paraguay, Peru, Surinam and e Uruguay
 Asian Group

7. Introduction
 Work share based on
 Legislation harmonization
 Changes in legislation
 Long term solution
 Simple reuse of work
 Higher benefits for the less efficient
 No sinergy among the offices

8. Objectives
 Electronic Platform for Collaborative Examination
 Sinergy in examination
 Synchronous and real-time
 Possibility of reuse of part or total work already done
 Purely technical analysis based on the worldwide
concepts already established
 Respect to the final decision of each office

9. Premises
 All information is public to system users
 Patent applications data, technical reports, logs,
comments
 System information of a given IP office is read-only
for other IP offices users
 Centralized access to update documents through
access to IP offices systems
 Grant access to public data for the society

10. Functionalities
 Multilingual system
 IP offices register
 Users linked to IP offices
 Perform patent application collaborative
examination
 Patent examiners from the same office
 Patent examiners from different offices

11. Functionalities
 First search based on
patent application or
priority number through
EPO OPS (Open Patent
Service) webservice
 Retrieval of all patent
applications of the family
(only for offices
registered into the
system)

12. Functionalities
 Presentation of the patent application and its family

13. Functionalities
 Visualization and edition of the bibliographic data
of a patent application

14. Functionalities
 Insert a new technical
report

15. Functionalities
 Insert a new technical
report
 Copy a technical report
related to another patent
application of the same
family

16. Functionalities
 Insert a new technical
report
 Copy a technical report
related to another patent
application of the same
family
 Associate a patent
application to a report of
another patent
application of the same
family

17. Functionalities
 Perform a simplified examination (simple technical
report)

18. Functionalities
 Perform a more complex examination (detailed
technical report)

19. Functionalities
 Automatic generation of a ODF format document
with all content of the technical report

20. Functionalities
 Centralized access to PROSUR patent office
systems

21. Functionalities
 Centralized access to public and global patent
application systems

22. Functionalities
 Forum

23. Functionalities
 On-line users tracking

24. Functionalities
 Message tool

25. Functionalities
 Action logs - Family, patent applications and
technical reports

26. Functionalities
 Family, patent applications and technical report
publication

27. Functionalities
 Statistics

28. Functionalities
 Access as visitor
 Visualization of all public families, patent
applications and technical reports

29. Workflow
 Flexible workflow, allowing multiple sinchronous or
assinchronous interactions
 Starts with family retrieval
 Ends with family publication
 Allows several intermediate collaborative steps to
enhance the technical report
 Each IP office will have a “collaborative queue” of
patent applications for collaborative examination
 Brazil will only perform examination through e-PEC

30. Workflow
1 – Retrieve patent application family
2 – Exam patent application
3 – Perform search
4 – Perform complementary search
5 – Write technical report
6 – Access other technical report
7 – Copy other technical report
8 – Change technical report
9 – Access forum
10 – Generate document with technical
report
11 – Publish report
12 – Publish family

31. Results
 Collaborative examination
 Sinergy in examination
 No need to change legislation
 Enhance technical report quality
 Real-time, wide and effective discussion about the
technology and access to update and wider range of
documents
 Get to faster decisions
 Higher quality of examination which leads to reduction
in number of analysis steps

32. Results
 Potencial strategic partnership with brazilian
organizations
 CNPq - http://www.cnpq.br/
 Strenghtning of international strategical
partnerships
 PROSUR project
 Technical partnership beetween Brazil and Argentina
 Interest of other countries that are not part of
PROSUR project
 Transparency for the society

33. Results
 All patent examiners from Brazil, Argentina, Chile,
Colombia, Ecuator, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay
already registered into e-PEC platform
 Stimulus to rigorous examination of patent
applications for countries
 Surinam (one user)
 South Africa (negotiation ongoing)

34. Conclusions
 The synchronous and real-time examination
methodology among intellectual property offices
can help solving backlog and enhance quality of
analysis
 e-PEC platform can be used throughout the patent
offices and research institutions worldwide for joint
understanding of the technology claimed by patent
applications

35. Next steps
 Translation machine
 High fidelity for portuguese, spanish and english
aiming the translation of technical reports
 Good fidelity to translate from other languages to
portuguese, spanish and english aiming the
understanding of technical content
 Integration with other IP offices legacy systems

36. Next steps
 Improvement of patent applications search
functionalities
 Improvement of patent applications analysis
possibilities
 Changes in graphical user interface
 More options for technical reports

37. e-PEC – Electronic Platform for Collaborative Examination
Questions ?
Thank you very much
Alex Garcia Todorov
INPI / CEDIN
todorov@inpi.gov.br