China traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Patent Database

Abstract

The deep indexed China Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Patent Database was established by the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) of PR China. The purpose of creating this database was mainly to meet the need of patent examination. The database has already been put to use in the patent examination department in SIPO since April 2002. The Chinese version of the database covers TCM related patent applications published from 1985 to current in China. It contains over 19,000 bibliographic records and over 40,000 TCM formulas. In order to present this database to WIPO, an English demo version was created and opened to the world through the WIPO gate. There are 29 search fields in the database that fall into four categories: bibliographic information, subject index terms, uses/effects, TCM formulas. Rewritten titles and abstracts provide users with more searchable information. The system was built with multiple search features: quick search, advanced search, TCM formula search, and search history tracing function. Moreover, two special features created in the system are very useful for improving searching efficiency: cross-file search based on TCM dictionary and TCM similarity search. The cross-file search enables users to locate a specific TCM in the TCM dictionary file and then cross-file search that name in the patent bibliographic file for relevant records. TCM similarity search enables users to do one-stop searching easily for complex search queries.