Products

A product is the thing you are defending: the item under freedom-to-operate review, and the concrete object every patent claim gets checked against. You add it to the database, hand Patalyze its description, files and images, and from there it can start to understand what the product actually is.

How we understand products#

We understand a product as a structured document rather than a wall of text. You assemble it from building blocks: a feature tree that spells out what the product does, images and files that hold its diagrams and datasheets, screenshots and replays that capture its pages. Every block adds structure, and that structure is what lets the model read a product well, so the richer the blocks and the cleaner each one, the better Patalyze grasps what the product is and the sharper every claim comparison that follows.

Attributes carry that understanding into the large view. Where building blocks let the model understand a single product in depth, attributes work across the whole set: structured fields such as category, manufacturer and territory that let you analyze and visualize many products at once, filtering, grouping and charting them across tables and dashboards.

Search & add products#

From the Add menu in a research database there are three ways to bring a product in, each suited to how much you already have in hand: search the wider catalog for products that already exist, crawl one straight from its website, or write up your own from the source material you hold.

Search for products#

Search for products finds them by their features and categories, running over the shared catalog of products rather than the patent corpus. Point it at a competitor and Patalyze surfaces matching items from the wider catalog, handy when you want to see who else sits in the same space.

You narrow the field with filters, each a field, an operator and one or more values, stacked with And or Or, over the same structured attributes a product carries: category, manufacturer, distributor and territory.

The matches preview in a table as you build, and the ones you keep drop into your database as products of their own.

Crawl from website#

Crawl from website fetches product information directly from one or more URLs, so a product page or spec sheet on the open web becomes a product in your database. Give Patalyze a link, or several on the same domain, and it works through the pages in the background.

Each page it visits is captured as a screenshot, and an interactive session is kept as a replay, so the crawled product lands in the doc with its source pages attached and its features read straight from them.

Write or upload#

Write or upload is the route for your own product, the one you already have the source material for: type or paste a description and drop in PDFs and images, such as specifications, brochures, datasheets and photos. The description becomes the product doc, and Patalyze reads everything you give it to build the feature tree and fill in the attributes.

The product doc#

Every product opens as a document on its own page, the product doc. It works like a note: a title, a description, and any source material you drop in, all held as blocks in one place. The product doc is the single source the feature extraction and every later mapping read from, so it is where the analysis really begins.

Blocks#

Inside the doc, type / to open the block menu. Alongside ordinary text, a product doc gives you a handful of blocks made for the source material behind a product.

Drawing#

A drawing block is a whiteboard canvas inside the doc. Sketch the product by hand, a mechanism or a rough layout, anything easier drawn than written. It opens full screen to draw and settles back into the doc as a preview.

Image#

An image block places a picture in the doc, with an optional caption. Product photos and diagrams give the analysis visual evidence to draw on.

PDF#

A PDF block embeds a document, a datasheet or brochure, with its first page previewed inline. Patalyze reads the PDF and folds what it finds into the product's features, and you can open or download it straight from the doc.

Screenshot#

When you crawl a product from the web, each captured page lands as a screenshot block, labeled with the page it came from so you can trace the product back to its source.

Replay#

A replay block embeds a recording of a crawled session, so an interactive product page is preserved as something you can play back rather than a single frozen frame.

Feature tree#

The feature tree is the structured outline of what the product is and does, numbered and nestable. It is the spine of the product: these are the exact features each patent claim element gets compared against.

Beyond these, the product doc is a full rich-text editor: headings, lists, tables, quotes and code are all there for any notes you want to keep alongside the product.

System attributes#

System attributes are the lightweight metadata Patalyze defines on every product, distinct from the features it reads from the doc. The default set covers a product's websites, categories, manufacturers, distributors and territories, and you can edit any of them inline.

When you search for a product or crawl one from its website, Patalyze fills these in from the source as it brings the product in. When you write up your own, it pre-fills what it can from your description and files, and the rest are yours to set.

The category is what sorts your database into kinds of thing, so products group into whatever families fit the field you are working in, with the item under review sitting among its peers. Attributes are handy for filtering and grouping products on tables and dashboards.

Beyond this default set, you can add your own attributes to capture what an analysis produces but the source never holds, like a reviewer, a priority or a deadline. See attributes for the full picture.

Mapping to patents#

Once a product has features and the database has patents, Patalyze maps each patent's claims against those features. Every element of a claim gets a status, present, probably present, or absent, so you can read at a glance how close a given patent sits to your product.

Each claim is then scored from the elements that count: the share of scored elements found in the product, expressed as a percentage and shaded into a risk band so the worst overlaps stand out.

On a table, every patent becomes a mapping column against the product, and each cell shows its strongest claims so the highest-risk patents surface first.

Mappings are the heart of a freedom-to-operate review. For how one is built, scored and reviewed in full, see mappings.