Re:USPTO to add surcharge on non-DOCX patent applications in...
by ramoz on Friday August 26, 2022 @02:22PM
(#32610976)
I get that you worked with them it seems, but would argue that your hunch is wrong here.
Regulatory processes, business systems, and international integration are plagued by PDF OCR complexities. OCR creates systemic issues and an anatomy of complex system architectures. Im sure XML is a typical downstream for parsing anyways. Use DOCX to enhance quality of the overall scope of integrations.
Re:USPTO to add surcharge on non-DOCX patent applications in...
by apocalyptic0n3 on Friday August 26, 2022 @03:06PM
(#32611453)
They could just use standardized application forms the way they do for research reports they require (the "ISA ###" forms). Those forms are easily parsable by things like pdftk and don't require any OCR.
I don't necessarily disagree with your point (since it makes complete sense), just wanting to point out that they already have a system in place for this using other means (although even there they are moving toward XML instead, likely because of what a pain it is to deal with text that exceeds the area of the input in PDFs)
Having worked directly with their teams in the past (although not on this), a lot of their systems seemed to evolve naturally over time based on the needs present. In that industry, a large majority of the documents being passed back and forth are DOCX. So my semi-educated guess is someone built a system to handle some simple intake tasks for DOCX applications because a large majority already were, it evolved over a few years, and when they finally decided to fully automate the process, they decided to build upon what they have which only supported DOCX and it was cheaper/easier to mandate everyone submit in that format than to build a new system or add support for others.