Patinformatics as a business process: A guideline through patent research tasks and tools

Since Trippe [1] introduced the term 'patinformatics' a lot of progress has been made in this particular field of information science. However, there is still need for a more comprehensive framework to structure the variety of tasks related to 'patinformatics', to highlight essential functions within the patinformatics process and to identify those process parts, which are supported by currently available software tools, and others, which are not. In this paper we apply business process modeling to describe the patinformatics process for supporting managerial decision making. The process model enables an overview of major tasks within patinformatics and links them to currently available tools. This paper provides a guideline through patent research for most users of patent information. It may also be employed as a fundamental model for the comparison of patinformatics software applications and approaches. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.