Allow Overlapping Technologies

Decide whether to group into mutually exclusive technologies or allow overlapping technologies

When creating a report and applying more than one technology classifier, you will be presented with the following 'Technology settings' on report creation.

When we consider a report applying classifiers to any set of patents, every patent will receive a score for each classifier between 0 and 1. Remember that a classifier marks every patent family as positive or negative based on the score. Everything above 0.5 is deemed to be a positive result.
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By default, the option to 'group in mutually exclusive technologies' will be selected. In choosing this option, each patent family of your report, will be accounted for in ONE SINGLE classifier category with the highest score above the 0.5 threshold.
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In choosing this option, each patent family of your report, will be accounted for in EVERY classifier category with a score above the 0.5 threshold resulting in duplicate results.​

Consider the question that you're trying to answer with your report. If you're using the platform to compare the number of patent families in your portfolio to your competitors, and reviewing portfolio size or patenting activity, you would likely 'group in mutually exclusive technologies' to avoid double counting of patent families in your report.

If you're using the platform to look into technology trends and to capture all inventions across the classifier technologies selected in your report, you would likely select to 'allow overlapping technologies' in order to ensure that all results are captured and to see which inventions fall across more than one technology classifier.

You can review this within the results of your report by clicking into the underlying data, and in the technology column, these are split by the verticle bar '|' symbol as follows: