Use of optical storage for patent image retrieval: the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's automated patent system
Stephen R. Jacobson · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1990
The Automated Patent System (APS) was designed, among other things, to assist the patent examiner in performing the patent search. It is a fully distributed system that uses custom-built high-resolution dual-display intelligent workstations, optical file servers, mainframes, and support computers networked together using Ethernet technology. The system is composed of two parts which are highly integrated: a full text search system and a patent image retrieval system. When fully deployed, APS will have an image data base of up to 30 terabytes being accessed from over 1000 workstations. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has had problems with their optical drives, and although they are fairly stable today, we still experience a moderately high hardware failure rate. The optical drive problems include media instability, hardware design errors, vendor problems, and configuration control failures. We intend to purchase additional drives in the future, and are re-evaluating the exclusive use of optical storage in light of recent advances in magnetic storage technology.