examiner
Examiner or The Examiner may refer to:
Occupations
* Bank examiner, a kind of auditor
* Examiner (Roman Catholicism), a type of office in the Roman Catholic Church
* Examinership, a concept in Irish law
* Medical examiner
* Patent examiner
* Tr ...
s of patent offices or other people to categorize (code) documents, such as published
patent application
A patent application is a request pending at a patent office for the grant of a patent for an invention described in the patent specification and a set of one or more claims stated in a formal document, including necessary official forms and re ...
s, according to the technical features of their content. Patent classifications make it feasible to search quickly for documents about earlier disclosures similar to or related to the invention for which a
patent
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...
is applied for, and to track technological trends in patent applications.
Searches based on patent classifications can identify documents of different languages by using the codes (classes) of the system, rather than words. Patent classification systems were originally developed for sorting paper documents, but are nowadays used for searching patent databases.
The International Patent Classification (IPC) is agreed internationally. The
United States Patent Classification
The United States Patent Classification is an official patent classification system in use and maintained by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). It was mostly replaced by the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) on January 1, ...
(USPC) is fixed by the
United States Patent and Trademark Office
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark registration authority for the United States. The USPTO's headquarters are in Alex ...
German Patent Classification The German Patent Classification is a patent classification system that was used in several European countries.
History
The German Patent Office (German: ''Kaiserliches Patentamt'') started developing a classification system for its patent documen ...
(DPK) was fixed by the German Patent Office (''Deutsches Patentamt'').
In October 2010, the
European Patent Office
The European Patent Office (EPO) is one of the two organs of the European Patent Organisation (EPOrg), the other being the Administrative Council. The EPO acts as executive body for the organisation
(EPO) and USPTO launched a joint project to create the
Cooperative Patent Classification
The Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) is a patent classification system, which has been jointly developed by the European Patent Office (EPO) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).European Classification (ECLA), which was based on the IPC but adapted by the EPO.
British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...