Annex A – Definitions
Application date: The date on which an application was filed for a patent. This enables an accurate temporal reflection of the technical content of a patent application.
Patent: A patent is a right, granted by government, to exclude others from making, using, or selling your invention.
Patent family: One or more published patents with a shared priority patent. Generally there is one invention per patent family.
Priority date: A patent can claim priority from an earlier application. This usually happens for two reasons: a) when an application is filed in one country, international convention dictates that the applicant then has 12 months to file a corresponding application abroad. Thus the patent application would then have a priority date, which indicates the earliest date attributed to the invention; b) an earlier application may contain part of a subsequent invention so a subsequent application, made within 12 months of filing, may claim priority from the earlier application. However, in the new application, this date is only valid for the part of the invention which appears in the earlier application. Care should therefore be taken when analysing the priority date of an invention.
Publication date: The date on which the patent application was published. A patent is normally first published (“A” publication) 18 months after the priority date or the application date, whichever is earlier. Depending on the jurisdiction, a patent is then given a “B” or “C” publication code when the patent is granted. Any further publications (e.g. following correction) are given a numbered publication code in most jurisdictions (for example: “A1”, “A2”, “B1”, “B2”).
Annex B – Methodology
Search strategy
The search strategy used to generate the dataset for this analysis was based on a combination of predetermined IPC codes, as well as specific keywords. For the purpose of this report, the Canadian dataset consists of a patent family where at least one application has an applicant with a Canadian address.
The applicant data was cleansed to remove duplicate entries which relate to the same applicant but where a different naming convention was used due to spelling errors, international variations, etc. Due to the size of the dataset, the emphasis was put on cleansing records relating to the top applicants. Some inconsistencies may still occur in the naming of applicants with smaller patent portfolios.
IPC codes
Table 5, which was developed by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), identifies two categories linked to the shale oil and gas sub-sector. This concordance is used to define the focus of this analysis. The three IPCs related to shale oil and gas, identified in bold in Table 5, are examined in Table 6.
| Category | IPC description | IPC classification (2014.01) |
|---|---|---|
| Basic materials chemistry | Covers typical mass chemicals such as herbicides, fertilisers, paints, petroleum, gas, detergents, etc. | A01N; A01P; C05*; C06*; C09B; C09C; C09F; C09G; C09H; C09K; C09D; C09J; C10B; C10C; C10F; C10G; C10H; C10J; C10K; C10L; C10M; C10N; C11B; C11C; C11D; C99Z. |
| Civil engineering | Covers construction of roads and buildings as well as elements of buildings such as locks, plumbing installations or strong rooms for valuables. A special part also refers to mining. | E02*; E01B; E01C; E01D; E01F-001; E01F-003; E01F-005; E01F-007; E01F-009; E01F-01*; E01H; E03*; E04*; E05*; E06*; E21*; E99. |
| Shale oil and gas IPC | IPC description |
|---|---|
| C09K 8* | Materials for applications not otherwise provided for; Applications of materials not otherwise provided for; Compositions for drilling of boreholes or wells; Compositions for treating boreholes or wells, e.g. for completion or for remedial operations. |
| E21B* | Earth or rock drilling; obtaining oil, gas, water, soluble or meltable materials or a slurry of minerals from wells. |
| C10B* | Destructive distillation of carbonaceous materials for production of gas, coke, tar, or similar materials (underground gasification of minerals). |
To ensure that only relevant patent information is extracted from the Thomson Innovation patent search database, a combination of keywords and IPC codes were used with the database. The following query was used in Thomson Innovation to extract the relevant patents for examining this industry sub-sector:
IC=(C10B* OR C10G* OR E21B* OR C09K008*) AND CTB=("Shale" OR "KEROGEN OIL" OR "LIGHT OIL" OR "CANNEL OIL" OR "OGHEAD COAL" OR "ALUM SHALE" OR "STELLARITE" OR "ALBERTITE" OR "KEROSENE SHALE" OR "BITUMINITE" OR "GAS COAL" OR "ALGAL COAL" OR "WOLLONGITE" OR "SCHISTES BITUMINEUX" OR "TORBANITE" OR "KUKERSITE" OR "TIGHT GAS" OR "TIGHT OIL" OR "BAKKEN") AND AD>=(20000101) AND AD<=(20140821) NOT TI=("COAL MINING" OR "BIOFUEL" OR "COAL TAR");
Annex C – Limitations
The following limitations should be kept in mind when interpreting the analysis results:
- Classification codes are applied either automatically or manually, so discrepancies across different IP offices may arise. Multiple classification codes can be applied to a single record, which can dilute the specific technical area of innovation. For a given patent family, the primary IPC applied may differ from one patent family member to another.
- Even though the applicant data field is cleansed, it is a manual process and therefore requires some interventions. Mergers and acquisitions were not examined as part of this data cleansing process.
- Records identified as “individuals” may not necessarily be private inventors. Not all companies adopt similar filing strategies, resulting in some choosing to identify their employees as applicants instead of the company name.
- Inventor fields are not cleansed and normalized; consequently, inventor rankings and relations may not be accurate.