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3 posts
vdacru
Last seen: 07/15/2022 - 08:08
Joined: 04/26/2020 - 02:45
Patent Assignee

Hi PatentsView Team

I am currently collecting patent data on a list of companies. I have matched the company names with the rawassignee data and am now manually checking the results.

I have noticed that often the patent info on the assignee-at-issue provided by patentsview.org does not correspond to the applicant info provided by google patents. For example for the patent with the publication number US4172495, the assignee at issue is Energy Services LLC, however, google states that the application was filed by Energy Systems Corp.

This difference in assignee-at-issue and patent applicant is very often the case for the matching results that I got. Could you explain why this is the case?

Thank you!

Vanessa

Fri, 07/01/2022 - 12:16
PVTeam
Role: moderator
Last seen: 04/26/2024 - 10:39
Joined: 10/17/2017 - 10:47
Assignee name differences

Hello Vanessa!

For the case that you mention, Patent 4172495, I was able to confirm that our rawassignee records in our downloads file do show that the assignee name listed on the patent was "Energy Systems Corporation." However, our disambiguated assignee table lists the corresponding disambiguated entity for this raw record under the name "Energy Services LLC."

Our disambiguation algorithm determined that the rawassignee records for "Energy Systems Corporation" and "Energy Services LLC"  were similar enough that they likely represented the same entity and that "Energy Services LLC" was more likely to be the most current and accurate name. We are always working on making our disambiguation process as accurate as possible, but it can sometimes combine entities that are in fact distinct, so when it's important to ensure that assignee names match original documentation exactly, we would recommend using the rawassignee table over the disambiguated assignee table.

If you have any other examples where the records in the rawassignee table seem to conflict with other sources, or if you're seeing this conflict in a different one of our data sources, please provide additional examples and context so we can follow up on them.

Best,
PVTeam

Tue, 07/05/2022 - 04:48
vdacru
Last seen: 07/15/2022 - 08:08
Joined: 04/26/2020 - 02:45
Dear PV Team Thank you for…

Dear PV Team

Thank you for your reply! 

Good to know that those are based on an algorithm. 

I actually came across many examples where the algorithm is faulty. Here are some examples:

- The algorithm seems to often aggregate parent companies and subsidiaries. For example patents assigned to American Electric Power Service Corp are in the parents entity American Electric Power Co.

- The algorithm sometimes also struggles with company suffixes, for example Enron Inc is placed under the assignee Enron Corp. However, those are two different companies. 

I hope this helps!

All the best

Vanessa