Working Groups, Expert Forums and Task Forces
The majority of the PDG activities is taking place in the Working Groups, Expert Forums and Task Forces. Each WG, EF and TF has one or more (co-)chairpersons, selected from the group's members, who is/are responsible for its smooth operation and who presents an annual report of progress and future plans at the Members' Conference.
Working Groups address topics of shared relevance for patent information professionals, enabling ongoing collaboration and exchange.
Expert forums bring together specialists and interested members to collaborate on a focused technical topic, tool, or platform.
Task forces are temporary teams created to complete a specific, well‑defined task. They are dissolved once the task is fulfilled.
The task of monitoring, testing or comparing patent information resources is carried out within the WGs, EFs and TFs of the PDG in such a way that duplication of effort is avoided as much as possible but where possible, there is cooperation between different groups.
Companies that send their experts to the working group, expert forum or task force meetings consider their time and money well spent. Members share and exchange best practices and their experiences concerning databases, hosts, vendors and producers. Furthermore, they make qualified and considered proposals to vendors and patent offices for improvements, new services and products.
The current groups are:
- Working Group IMPACT, focusing on data quality, access and availability
- Working Group Retrieval and Evaluation (R&E), focusing on finding and evaluating patent information
- Working Group Analysis and Visualisation (A&V), focusing on analysis of patent metadata and patent content, and their presentation in graphic form
- Task Force Education and Development, identifying development needs, promoting learning opportunities, supporting career progression
- Expert Forum Chemistry, focusing on retrieval of chemical patent information, including chemical structure and reaction searching
- Expert Forum Biotech, focusing on retrieval of biotechnology related patent information, including sequence searching
- Expert Forum Sustainability, focusing on retrieval of Sustainable Development Goals related patent information, including how to search and analyse SDG related topics
- Expert Forum Orbit NG, focusing on the tool Orbit including its developments and the implications for its users
- Expert Forum STNext, focusing on the tool STNext including its developments and the implications for its users
- Expert Forum PatentSight (and other patent related LexisNexis products), focusing on the tool PatentSight including its developments and the implications for its users
- Expert Forum Management, focusing on how to manage patent information professionals
- Expert Forum Data Science, focusing on the use of data science in patent information