Distributed processing system of Japanese patent office for searching patent gazettes

摘要

The distributed processing system of the Japanese Patent Office for searching patent gazettes came into operation in January 1997. About 30 million internal patent gazettes (dating back to the Meiji era, 1867-1912) are electronically stored in 12 UNIX servers. This system supports the referencing of these patent gazettes from 400 workstations for patent examination and general inspection services. In response to the increased volume of patent gazettes and the load on the equipment formaintaining and improving the level of performance, the patent gazette reference system was downsized. The most important aspects of this system are the severe performance requirement (display of the next page within 1 second) and reliability requirement as a mission-critical system.Toshiba completed the work of system development and conversion of data for the server in the short time of about 8 months