Common Hybrid Classification

Vision

The strong and continuing growth of the global patent document collection puts increasing pressure on the efficiency of patent searching in the patent offices of the world. Despite considerable developments in the area of full text searching, it is still the case that in majority of technical fields, the only way to ensure efficient high-quality patent searching in large multi-language document collections is by investing consistently in classification.

The International Patent Classification alone, or the local classification systems of the IP5 offices individually, are insufficient to meet the needs of the large offices. Therefore, the IP5 need to take the lead in this area by reinforcing their attempts to achieve a common approach to patent classification. A transparent and dynamic common classification system built using the best features from each of the IP5 Offices' classification systems will substantially increase the efficiency of access to all documents issued and classified by these offices. This benefit extends to all other patent offices in the world engaged in patent searching and to the general public using patent classification for their patenting business.

A common IP5 classification system will offer sufficient depth and detail according to the needs in the different technical areas and it will cover the main body of the global patent document collection. It will also ensure that classification-based searches carried out in the IP5 Offices are centred around similar search strategies. This paves the way to an increased level of trust between the examiners of the five offices and greatly facilitates work sharing within the IP5, as well as improving search and classification efficiency, uniformity and quality.