Patent office weighs no-cost approach to making its data more accessible

The United States Patent and Trademark Office is facing a dilemma. President Barack Obama wants an open government ,and has directed agencies to make their data available to the public. As the agency that has granted more than 8 million patents throughout the years, and registers trademarks on top of that, USPTO has a ton of data that it wants to share with the public but can’t.

Although officials embrace the president’s Open Government Initiative, they don’t have the technical capability to post all of their data onto the Web in a comprehensible format. Some of the information isn’t in bulk or in machine-readable formats. Other datasets aren’t arranged consistently. But most of all, the office doesn’t have the money to fix these hitches and then post the information on the Web.

In the meantime, USPTO has proposed a solution: The agency is interested in letting a contractor arrange the data, publish it on the Web for the public, and then repackage enhanced datasets for sale.

“The USPTO envisions a cooperative, mutually beneficial relationship with the contractor,” according to a May 6 presolicitation notice posted on Federal Business Opportunities Web site. The office is interested in one or more no-cost contracts where the vendor would pay to get the data ready to be posted online.

After the data is online, the contractor has permission to mine the data and repackage it for resale to make money, according to the notice.

USPTO's proposal is one strategy to get its data online, and the responses it receives to this notice will determine if the office takes another, more traditional approach, the notice states.

Posted by Matthew Weigelt on May 11, 2010 at 11:56 AM