Quality Assurance of text and image databases at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

Issue title: THE DATABASE BUSINESS: Managing Today – Planning for Tomorrow. Papers from the 30th NFAIS Annual Conference

Guest editors: A.W. Elias

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Grooms, David W.

Affiliations: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Washington, DC 20231, USA

Abstract: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) applies a rigorous Quality Assurance (QA) program to its text and image databases, which comprise part of the Automated Patent System (APS). QA efforts are applied from the time data is captured, either by conventional data entry, optical character recognition, or digitization of paper files, to the point at which the data is actually loaded for on-line use to either magnetic storage devices or optical media. The volume of the data inspected via QA will eventually exceed thirty terabytes, consisting of issued U.S. and foreign patents, in both text and image format.

DOI: 10.3233/ISU-1988-82-418

Journal: Information Services & Use, vol. 8, no. 2-4, pp. 161-165, 1988