From the about page:
Welcome to The Lens, an open global cyberinfrastructure built to make the innovation system more efficient, fair, transparent and inclusive. The Lens is an extension of work started by Cambia in 1999 to render the global patent system more transparent, called the Patent Lens. The Lens is a greatly expanded and updated version of the Patent Lens with vastly more data and greater analytical capabilities. Our goal is to enable more people to make better decisions, informed by evidence and inspired by imagination.
The Lens already hosts a number of powerful tools for analysis and exploration of the patent literature, from integrated graphical representation of search results to advanced bioinformatics tools. But this is only just the beginning and we have lot more planned! See what we’ve done and what we plan to do soon on our timeline below:
The Lens current covers 80 million patents in 100 different jurisdictions.
When you create an account, the following appears in your workspace:
Welcome to the Lens! The Lens is a tool for innovation cartography, currently featuring over 78 million patent documents – many of them full-text – from nearly 100 different jurisdictions. The Lens also features hyperlinks to the scientific literature cited in patent documents – over 5 million to date.
But more than a patent search tool, the Lens has ben designed to make the patent system navigable, so that non-patent professionals can access the knowledge contained in the global patent literature. Properly mapped out, the global patent system has the potential to accelerate the pace of invention, to generate new partnerships, and to make a vast wealth of scientific and technical knowledge available for free.
The Lens is currently in beta version, with future versions featuring expanded access to both patent and scientific literature collections, as well as improved search and analytic capabilities.
As you already know, patents have extremely rich semantics and mapping of those semantics could be very profitable.
If you saw the post: Secure Cloud Computing – Very Secure, you will know that patent searches on “homomorphic encryption” are about to become very popular.
Are you ready to bundle and ship patent research?