Fuzzy Matching
TotalPatent One® supports "fuzzy" or appropriate string matching. Use fuzzy matching if you are not sure of the correct spelling of a keyword, and you will get documents that contain terms similar to the search term. The allowed edit distance range for fuzzy matching is 0-2 characters.
Fuzzy matching is achieved using the tilde (~) in the query syntax. The search term is expanded out to a number of closely spelled similar terms (based on edit distance). This means that often misspelled words can be retrieved.
Example: TI: (accommodate~) will find all documents with search term variations in the title on the often misspelled word "accommodate" (such as acommodate).
The edit distance of 2 characters means that this is the maximum number of characters that the search can apply to exactly match the string you are searching for. In our example "acommodate" requires one insertion (c) to match with the search term "accommodate". But "accommodates" will also be part of the search results, it requires 1 insert (s) at the end. As well as "accommodative", requiring 2 character deletions ("i" and "v"). Since the term "accommodation" requires three character changes to match the query term, "accommodation" will not be found within the edit distance of 2 characters.
You can reduce the edit distance of your fuzzy matching by adding the exact edit distance to your query. For example: Accommodate~1 will replace only 1 character.
TRUECASE Operator
The truecase operator (TRUECASE) is used before the search term to filter the results on
capitalization.
| Operator | Result |
| TRUECASE |
|
TRUECASE Highlighting
If you use the TRUECASE operator in any text fields (TI, AB, CLM, CLM1, CLMI, CLME, TAC, DSC, TACD, TA, DSCDT, DSCDR), the keywords you use it with will be highlighted in the results list and in the document view. In case you search for the same keyword in the same query in different letter cases (e.g. TI:(TRUECASE(RECEIVER)) and FT:(receiver)), the words will be highlighted in different colors in the results list.
ATLEASTn Operator
The ATLEASTn operator allows you to limit your search results to documents in which your query keyword occurs at least n number of times in the entire document. The value of n can be any number from 2 up to 255. Example: ATLEAST5(switch) searches documents where the term "switch" occurs at least five times.
The function is limited to a single keyword, and can only be used as a full text search (title, abstract,
claims and description).