Information intelligence 2 insights
Raw information is available endlessly. To get answers for easy questions is mostly simple. Coming to insights from information in more complex cases (the real world scenario) often is tedious and requires a lot of intelligence – from professionals and from software that provides smart solutions for all analysis process steps. Insights means to get answers which are precise and reliable.

Analyses in information verticals or horizontally across sources
Broadly speaking two types of analysis software providers are in the market: providers offering information portals (data in combination with search and analysis tools) and on the other hand providers with software “only”. i3 belongs the 2nd category.
In the 1st category we speak about verticals, often limited to their own data with a deep integration of the most commonly used analysis functions – limited to the data as they are available.
The real world analysis cases have to deal with data from several information sources, where you need a “horizontal” tool, integrating heterogeneous sources and acting as a “Swiss knife” for analysis – going far beyond common functions. Many good reasons to utilize these verticals for appropriate questions, but often no alternative to horizontal tools with support for the many analysis situations an expert is confronted with in daily life – or coming back to the Swiss Knife: do not open a bottle of wine with a screwdriver.

Minimize risk with information based decisions
I3 is not a black box – each action on data can be transparent for experts – thus enabling information analysts to assess the reliability of their analysis results – thus minimizing the risk with information based decisions.

Artificial intelligence (AI)
AI is powerful but a black box for users. Imagine that an analyst is asked for the degree of reliability of analysis results, e.g. by a patent attorney or a business decision maker. From my viewpoint nearly impossible. To avoid misunderstandings: AI is a great alternative for searching to get new ideas for research or business opportunities. But at the end of the day decision makers need to be assured that they can build on concrete instead of on quicksand.

I3 is analysis process based
The process steps are characterized below. Focusing on processes helps to structure a software with plenty of professional tasks, thus allowing a clear design, thus being user-friendly and not overcrowded with too many functionalities in one place. Process steps e.g. are search and filter, classification, handle patent families, evaluation, normalize, cleanup or complement data, generate required new classification terms from text, visualization, or reporting.

Analysis process in a quick walkthrough

·         Import: harmonize search results from various data sources into a single format, which is the prerequisite to analyze data at all. This is done with import filters, which apply the display rules of providers.

·         Evaluation & relevance check: to identify the needles in haystacks effectively smart support is needed: a flexible working environment, features to tag and comment, intelligent support to quickly and reliably identify relevant sections in text like patent claims, direct links to full text documents, or display of chemical structures or technical drawings.
Furthermore concepts to identify the needles are expedient.

·         Normalize and add value: both important steps in the pre-visualization phase. Clean-up e.g. assignee names for proper statistics, derive missing data from existing ones with many edit functions, add missing pieces of information (text or images) from full text.

·         Classify: assign controlled vocabulary from indexing lists or thesauri to add the missing pieces (not available in the search results).

·         Structure & visualize: if a sufficient data quality is reached data can be visualized or structured (e.g. by navigable topic trees). This process step is important for technology or competitive analyses, identifying co-operation partners or rating players in markets.

·         Reporting & delivery: build a report for your customer with relevant snippets of your analysis in parallel.

·         Customer support for analysis results: can part of result delivery. A classic report can be read and is static. Ideally the analysis result can be packaged in a software with a minimum of easy functions to enable customers to show the delivered result and in addition to interactively work with the result.

* i3 Analyst only

Setup design principles

Installation of  new software in organizations with security rules may become an issue. To make the installation of i3 easy the requirements for setup are kept low: ALL files are installed in just one directory (where you have read and write access), no DLLs in system folders, no writing in Windows Registry.

I3 versions

I3 comes in three versions: ANALYST and  REPORT as bundle and i3 as a free STANDARD version. The same design, but different in functionalities. The free version is fully functional and serves information professionals with a lot of tools across the analysis process. i3 REPORT will be delivered together with i3 ANALYST, to serve customers with an easy-to-use software to work interactively with analysis results beyond a static analysis report. I3 ANALYST additionally comes with workspaces to normalize data, to extract and work with concepts, and a reporting module. Furthermore i3 ANALYST enables users to build new import filters and to train concept extraction to their needs.

Small file / project manager

To keep overview launching of i3 starts with a tabular display of files / projects and characterizing tags. This tool acts as a bracket for an i3 relevant files organized in folders of the file explorer. From here files can be tagged (e.g. status or comments), imported, opened, exported, saved or merged.

File management

Besides importing, opening, exporting or saving, merging of files * plays an important role: files with miscellaneous fields have to be assembled to one file. Challenges are to merge or not to the items from fields from the initial downloads or from fields added during analysis in i3 as own columns. The referencing of images in the merged file is not trivial. Moreover patent families have to be recalculated, and duplicates need to be detected. Merging of files is not only important to merge several imported search result into one project file, but also if tagging or indexing has been by more than one analyst: the results of their work shall be merged in a joint result file. Data are merged by a set of rules, which are described in the manual.

Import filter

These filters are rule and list based. They harmonize search results from various data sources into a single format, which is the prerequisite to analyze data at all. A thorough understanding of the display rules of database providers is mandatory build import filters. Currently import filters for selected databases from STN / STNext, Questel Orbit, Minesoft, Elsevier, NIH, EPO are available.

Update import filters

Besides updates with new i3 releases, updated import filters can be downloaded from this website and imported in i3 easily. No need to involve staff from IT – just two data files will be replaced.

Maintain import filters *

I3 comes with a given set of import filters for databases from selected hosts. Extending with a new host can only be done by the developer. But adding a new database for an existing host or editing the metadata can be done with a maintenance tool. Expert knowledge in database structure is a prerequisite to make use of this tool. But this tools enables experienced i3 users to expand import filters without having to wait for updates.

Duplicates

Removed during import. After merging files duplicates are also identified and can be removed. Please also cf. patent family generation.

Patent families

During import patent families are calculated according to the INPADOC definition. After merging files the calculation is re-run. Patent family members are highlighted with a tag and can be grouped for work. A patent family viewer tool allow to easily compare family members. For patent analysis the earliest member document In the i3 data set) is tagged for statistical evaluation.

Workspaces

The organization of data and functionalities into workspaces by topic reduces complexity of an application. There 6 workspaces in i3 ANALYST: projects, documents, indexes, concepts, analyses and report, 3 in the free version of i3: projects, documents, analyses. Each workspace organizes the need functionalities in taskbars.

Workspace navigator

Like in an internet browser forward and backward buttons enable effective switching between workspaces and functions in use without getting lost in “how to get back to my last action?”.

Flexible working environment

Documents in i3 are shown in a compact grid view or a document view. Users decide which fields (title, index terms, images, …) the want to hide or see in which order. Several options let you design an attractive layout. This layout is used for reports or export as well.

Column management and layout

Here you tell i3 which column you want to see (or hide) in a document in which order. Here also operations like add, rename, delete, merge or duplicate grid columns /document fields. For the presentation of text several layout options are available.

Links to primary literature

Source information like patent numbers or bibliographic information can be directly looked up in selected tools from the internet. Source information in the documents have been transformed into links: a click on a patent number directly opens the document in EspaceNet.
Additional URLs can be added with a small i3 tool.

Chemical structures and technical drawings

Will be imported into i3 and displayed as images together with text. During evaluation images from other source may be copied and added to an i3 document.

Add missing pieces of information: text, images, links

I3 imports text, images and links from search results. With the source information tool you may directly access the primary literature, which you may want to check during evaluation. From here you can copy text and images and paste them into i3, if these pieces are helpful for your customer.

Tagging

During evaluation you may make use of tags to either capture an editing state or to select for filtering. In addition a rating function and color coding for documents is offered.

Searching

A quick search and an advanced search tool is provided. Recall and precision can be adjusted by searching in document, in selected fields, in sentences only, or with NEAR operators between search terms. After a search the documents are filtered, and the result subset only is shown. From here a search in the search result can be started (refine search) or a new search. Search results can be stored in the file and recovered.

Document filters

During classification or analysis you want to work with subsets of documents. I3 comes with switches for all documents, search results, tagged documents, or analysis data. The filtered documents are shown, while the rest is hidden.

Classify

The interface has been developed for with special focus on consistency and speed. To add classification terms either one or more indexing lists or a thesaurus can be opened. The lists can be further developed during indexing (learning). The progress can be traced by the overall index, which allows renaming, deleting or merging terms.
Terms can be added or to all or the filtered subset of documents. Hence recursive advanced searches in combination with classifying allows a very quick addition of terms to many thousands documents.

Thesaurus builder *

Classifying may be done with thesaurus concepts. To build or edit thesauri, a thesaurus builder tool is made available in i3.

Normalization *

To been seen equivalent to harmonizing data and their formats. Analysis builds on counting classification terms, so they should be in a proper state. I3 comes with the INDEXES workspace to manipulate classification terms. Index data can be edited with a series of string handling routines with may options: rename, replace, delete, insert, split, merge, concatenate, or enrich. So you may e.g. enrich CPC codes with titles from a corresponding list to make coeds readable for your customers in reports. Or you merge names from the authors- and inventors field into a new field. Or you combine selected index terms to a new one.

For names a special name cleanup tool has been developed.

Name cleanup

A special type of normalization, which needs smart support to speed-up this process step and to enable a maximum of consistency. I3 provides a name cleanup tool for entities and people. The names are extracted and changed to cleaned names by a rule-based approach. You may check and edit cleaned names if needed. I3 records the changes for later reuse, thus learning from your preferences.

Multi-color highlighting and co-occurrence navigation

Especially in longer text like patent claims colored highlighting of terms from one or more lists is indispensable. Especially with longer text in patent claims or descriptions, identifying the relevant sections is of major importance to significantly speed up relevance check. This is done in i3 with multi colored term-highlighting and the i3 co-occurrence highlighting tool, which emphasizes terms in one sentence, thus focusing on relevant sections only.

Document navigator

Select column(s) in i3 to build a tree structure for topic navigation in documents. E.g. select patent assignee (PA) and a newly added field like “battery technologies” (BT) and build the navigator. The hierarchical structure shows each assignee with battery technologies as child item, and the titles (TI) below the child items (PA1 | BT1 | TI1 / TI2 / TI3 | BT2 | TI1 / TI2 | PA2 …). Selecting a title directly jumps to the selected document.

Store analysis results in file for reuse

E.g. having generated a detailed search result or having built a chart from a subset of documents, you may save store these results in the open file. So the stored search results can be recovered, or a chart can be re-executed and further edited. These stored results can also shared with your customers in i3 REPORT.

Share: copy and export

Results (e.g. tables, documents, charts, lists) from your analyses can be either exported to several file formats or copied to and pasted into office programs to prepare a report or a presentation.

Report builder *

I3 comes with a workspace for reports in i3 ANALYST. Basically i3 provides a spreadsheet with flexible tabs. With the help of a selection tool documents, tables, heat maps, charts and more are added to the selected report sheets. I3 offers the most usual edit and formatting functions to edit and comment the report. The complete report can be exported to Microsoft Excel; single sheets to RTF and EMF. The report can also be shared with your customers in i3 REPORT.

Interconnection of data

Different views on data are seamlessly interconnected. Some examples: selected bar in a chart -> metadata -> documents -> primary literature; concepts -> context -> documents.

Concept extraction *

In structured databases several data (e.g. publication date, patent assignee, keywords) are grouped by field names (column names in i3). During technology, white  space, or competitor analyses most often the concepts to analyzed are not indexed but part of text (e.g. title, abstract, claims). I3 comes with a concept extraction engine, which extracts relevant concepts together with metadata (e.g. document and field reference or position in a sentence). The workspace CONCEPTS provides functionalities to work with the extracted concepts.

Train concept extraction *

I3’s concept extraction is not a black box. You need to be informed about the basic rules for extraction and post-processing and i3 enables you to change parameters and to guide the extraction process according to your needs.

Work with concepts *

Two main use cases: 1) build index lists or thesauri for classification, hereby enabling tailor-made analyses, 2) alternative approach to reading documents (concept -> document instead of document -> concept).

Enable your customers better *

From my experience many customers like to receive analyses results as Excel file. So the provision of that format is indispensable. But a report is static, and perhaps the analyst has to be contacted again to provide different views on the data.

I3 REPORT is a very light version of i3 for your customers. It is easy to use, but allows to change the view on the delivered data. Moreover your customer can refer to preparatory work of the analysts: search results can be reactivated; stored charts can be re-executed and adapted by a customer; navigation trees, highlighting or charts are reactivated with a mouse-click. Nevertheless the Excel like report is also delivered with i3 REPORT, can be edited on demand, and exported to an Excel file.