Patent information now available online

Thanks to a new Web application, visitors to the U.S. Patent and Trademark's Web site can now access for free the full text of all patents dating back to 1976.

The new system, built by Dataware, references the text data of more than two million patents dating back to 1976. The second phase of the system, to be completed by March 1999, will make available the full-page document images of those patents, representing a full two terabytes of data.

The government service, free to anyone with a PC and a browser, is a perfect example of sophisticated technology making research and knowledge more user friendly and accessible, according to Dataware president and CEO Kurt Mueller