Searching in cooperative patent classification: comparison between keyword and concept-based search

International patent corpus is a gigantic source containing today about 80 million of documents. Every patent is manually analyzed by patent officers and then classified by a specific code called Patent Class (PC). Cooperative Patent Classification CPC is the new classification system introduced since January 2013 in order to standardize the classification systems of all major patent offices. Like keywords for papers, PCs point to the core of the invention, describing concisely what they contain inside. Most of patents strategies are based on PC as filter for results therefore the selection of relevant PCs is often a primary and crucial activity. This task is considered particularly challenging and only few tools have been specially developed for this purpose. The most efficient tools are provided by patent offices of EPO and WIPO. This paper analyzes their PCs search strategy (mainly based on keyword–based engines) in order to identify main limitations in terms of missing relevant PCs (recall) and non-relevant results (precision). Patents have been processed by KOM, a semantic patent search tool developed by the authors. Unlike all other PC search tools, KOM uses semantic parser and many knowledge bases for carrying out a conceptual patent search. Its functioning is described step by step through a detailed analysis pointing out the benefits of a concept-based search vis-à-vis a keyword-based search. An exemplary case is proposed dealing with CPCs describing the sterilization of contact lenses. Comparison could be likewise conducted on other PCs such as International (IPC), European (ECLA) or United States (USPC) patent classification codes.