and select "Industrial Property Digital Library". You then
have to select the Japanese menu.
The patents go back to Meiji (Spec #1), 1924 for Kokoku,
and 1971 for Kokai.
Kokai after 1993 are divided into subdocuments (e.g., Working
Examples) and include images. You have to select the
subdocument of interest and cannot simply download the
entire document.
The older documents are as images (100 dpi) and you also
have to page through them. At 100 dpi, the quality is perhaps
better than what you would get off the PTO microfilms and
by ordinary fax domestically. But it takes a skilled eye to read
them and OCR is out of the question.
For comparison, the documents we supply are at 600 dpi for
the post 1993 Kokai, at 400 dpi for 1971-1992 documents and
very clean hard copy for 1907-1970 documents.
I receive the ATIP summaries. As ATIP was started by an ex-NIST
official, David Kahaner, you should be aware that government
viewpoints tend to be emphasized over practical commercial aspects.
-- Alan Engel ISTA, Inc. ConvertedKokai(tm) machine translations of Japanese patents http://www.intlscience.com
Leland Ness wrote:
> Alan: Thanks for that. Do you think this presages the online release > of full-text Japanese patents? Not that the text itself is of much > help (at least to me), but the drawings will be interesting. Lee ness > PS: have you seen the summary of the ATIP report on OCR of > Chinese/Japanese? If not, I can forward it to you privately.