Govt to build digital database to boost inventions

Zakki P. Hakim, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The government is developing a digital database on national patent documents, to enable local researchers to determine industrial needs and industrial players to locate local inventions on the market.

One factor that contributed to the low rate of invention in the country was researchers' lack of interaction with industrial players that could use their inventions, a senior official said.

The existence of the database was expected to encourage interaction between the two parties, head of the Intellectual Property Center at the Indonesian Institute of Science (LIPI) Suprapedi told The Jakarta Post on Thursday, on the sidelines of a seminar on intellectual property rights.

"Indonesia needs to develop science and technology in order to be competitive in global trade," he said.

The two-day seminar, which closed on Thursday, was organized by the Directorate General of Intellectual Property Rights at the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

Currently, more than 13,000 documents are being stored at the Indonesian Patent Office in Tangerang.

All the documents will be converted into digital format, and will be ready for analysis by any interested party using the "patinformatics" tool.

Patinformatics, which was first introduced in the U.S. in 2002, is a science that helps people determine relationships and trends that would be difficult to see working with patent documents one by one.

Suprapedi said the existence of the digital information system would prevent new researchers from working toward inventions that had already been realized.

"Duplication has often occurred as researchers lack information on what's already out there," he said.

The digital information system is being developed by LIPI in cooperation with the property rights directorate general and WIPO, Suprapedi said, estimating that the project could cost Rp 2.5 billion (US$272,000).

Illustrating the low rate of invention in the country, Suprapedi said: out of 13,000 patents granted by the government as of December 2003, only 3.4 percent were conferred to local inventors, and the remaining 96.6 percent to foreign applicants.

Meanwhile, applications for patents submitted by local inventors to foreign countries were also lower compared to those submitted by neighboring countries, he said.

For instance, the number of patents secured by Indonesia and registered at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, as of September 2003, was 199, compared to 318 secured by the Philippines, 421 by Thailand, 631 by Malaysians, 2005 by India, 2,677 by Singapore, 2,932 by China and 522,047 by Japan.