Wikicite/grant/Chilean patents 1840-1910

Project summary

Project Name

Historic Chilean patents on a wiki site

Start/End dates

10 October 2020 to 30 April, 2021

Amount requested (and the currency you wish to receive it in)

US$ 8860

Amount requested (in US$ equivalent)

US$ 8860

The people

Contact person name/Wikimedia username

Peter B. Meyer, user:econterms

Contact person e-mail address

peter.meyerwikidc.org

[Alternatively, confirm that you have "Allow other users to email me" enabled in your account preferences]

Organisation (optional)

If this grant is for an organisation (for example a Wikimedia Affiliate), name it here

Wikimedia DC, fiscal sponsor

Project participants

Who is working on this project. For each member of the team, please describe any project-related skills, experience, or other background you have that might help contribute to making this idea a success.

• Prof. Bernardita Escobar Andrae (user:beni.escobar, bescobarutalca.cl or beni.escobar.andraegmail.com) -- Professor at University of Talca, former chief of Chilean patent office, chair of the Associación Chilena de Historia Económica, who has published about Chilean patents, longtime organizer of historic Chilean patent data and co-principal investigator here
• Peter B. Meyer (user:econterms), main author of Inventing aviation wiki which has patent data from many countries, on board of Wikimedia DC, and co-principal investigator here
• Leo Zimmermann, developer of content at Inventing aviation wiki, User:LTA on that site
• Research assistants undertaken by students from universities located in Santiago

The project

Description

Describe the project or event.

We will create a wiki designed for Chilean patent data for the period 1840-1910, including records for every published Chilean patent application in 1877-1910. The main language of the wiki will be Spanish.

The relevant data includes metadata about patent applications, patent grants, inventors, examiners, and related scientific and technical publications. There were about 3800 patent applications in this period and 2200 patents were granted. We can copy them freely because these documents were no longer under copyright once the patents expire, which occurred long ago.

The resulting wiki will be searchable and the data downloadable by any visitor. We can put entries for these patents onto wiki data using Quickstatements if this is desired by anyone at the end of the project.

Over time we can open the wiki to edits by an increasing number of people with knowledge of this topic, not knowing in advance if they are interested to participate.

Resources

Prof. Bernardita Escobar Andrae of the University of Talca, Chile has been computerizing information about Chilean patents and trademarks of the period 1840-1910. She was chief of the Chilean patent and trademark office.

She has gathered additional data beyond the information published in Arturo Montero's 1913 book that registered patent grants for the 1840-1910 period. From the 1877-1910 period, using the official gazette, she has added information about patent applications, including information regarding oppositions (formal recommendations against approving a patent application). The patent activity of the 1877-1910 covers a significant share of all patents granted during the 1840-1910 period. For 1900-1910, we have some information from the Chilean national archives (Archivo Nacional). To get the information from the remainder requires doing more primary research in the archives, which are somewhat accessible even in the covid period. fFor this project, we aim at gathering information for the 1890-1900 period, taking into account that some of the documents of the patent office seemed to have been lost in a fire in 1895. For this work, we budget for research assistants.

The design of the wiki will be similar to that of the Inventing Aviation wiki at http://econterms.net/aero which has data about thousands of patents related to aeronautics and aviation in any country up to 1920. The wiki uses the Cargo extension which enables us to create relational tables each kind of information: patents, patent grants, inventors, companies, and publications.

Using these tables, a wiki page can be programmed to show a report on elements of these underlying data. For example, page about an inventor can show a list of their patents and publications. A page about a company or university can list its patents. A page about an industry or technology area can show a list of the patents and publications associated with it. The reports are dynamic, so updates to the data in one area improves the data visible on related pages. This helps find and make accurate counts of the works by an inventor, and links between engineers, kinds of work, companies, and the patent office, as is shown on reports of the Inventing Aviation wiki.

Patent data to be gathered

• A date associated with the patent, usually the date of publication of the application or grant.
• The applicants filing for the patents, natural or legal persons (e.g. a firm or foundation)
• The title and subject of the patent
• Whether it was granted or rejected, and information about why
• Links to the patent document on the INAPI site or other sources
• Links to Wikidata items for people, institutions, patents, and other subjects with pages on this wiki

Motivation

Why is this project needed? What will it solve or improve?

Chilean patent data from before 1910 are not organized and available for research or reference in an easily searched database. Many of the relevant documents are online at the Chilean patent office (INAPI) but they are systematically referred to in an official gazette, the Diario Oficial. They were called privilejios esclusivos at the time not patentes.

If organized into a database that could be searched and sorted and augmented with additional fields of data, classic economic studies of patents could be conducted. A wiki adds further value as the various inventors, engineers, agents, and related scientific works can be hyperlinked together. The basic information about each patent could then be uploaded into Wikidata following the basic design discussed at d:Wikidata:WikiProject Patents.

The data will be useful for economic history along these lines:

• To understand technological change and business history in Chile.
• To understand worldwide technological change and business history affected by Chilean inventors and inventions, e.g. by building biographies of the engineers who at some point patented in the Chilean system.
• To identify and assign a label and URL for the patents that were not given identification numbers at the time.
• To understand the effects of administrative differences in patent systems. There is a key aspect of the Chilean system. Unlike other national patent systems of that time, the Chilean system made substantive examination compulsory, whereby usefulness, novelty and inventive step were examined. Peritos (examiners) were hired on a consulting basis to undertake examinations, and only late in 19th century officials from the patent office were hired to be considered as peritos in addition to external examiners. Peritos filed detailed reports issuing recommendations to grant or not the patent. Ever since the early patent system, patent applications were subject to pre grant oppositions from any interested party and to post grant annulment . That system calls for comparative study. What were the effects of this distinctive system? Example differences could be in its cost, speed, effectiveness, or the informativity of the evaluation by the consultants or opponents.
• An unusual aspect of this data is that we have almost all patent applications, only about half of which were granted. Studies of patents do not usually have information on patent applications which were denied. This data enables study of the selectivity of the patent system and the criteria used.

Activities

Tell us how you'll carry out your project. What will you and other organizers spend your time doing? What will you have done at the end of your project?

• Prototype website is now up: http://econterms.net/Patentes-chilenas
• Design the basic tables and reports (expected to be done by Nov 1)
• Upload the core data about patents and patent applications -- inventors, titles, filing dates, when and whether granted (to be done by Dec 1)
• Catalog and photograph documents in the Chilean archives to fill out some missing information aiming at filling the 1890-1910 period
• Complete a short academic paper describing the use a wiki for this kind of historic patent data, and what is achieved, and how to use it. (March-April 2021)
• Invite expert review (April 2021)

Those are basic milestones. The main activities are ongoing research leading to a flow of improvements

• Create growing numbers of wiki pages about inventors, consulting firms, and companies of the time which are in the patents records (throughout the grant period)
• Create pages with definitions and glossaries of relevant technical and administrative definitions (throughout the grant period).
• Research for information on the inventors and technologies in Chilean and U.S. archives and libraries, and online.
• Classify the patents by technological field, industry, and whether they are products or processes. Prof. Escobar has done most of this, but we want to apply also international modern classifications where possible, such as IPC, CPC, and NAICS categories so that the distribution of patents can be compared to those in other countries and to lists of Chilean firms and industries.
• Wikilink these pages to biographies and other articles in Wikipedias of various languages, Wikisource documents, images on Commons, definitions on Wiktionary, and Wikidata items to integrate this information usefully into the Wikimedia information systems. We expect to improve these Wikimedia sources with ongoing discoveries in the source information.
• Hyperlink these pages to historically relevant sources and documents, especially the main source documents on the Chilean patent office web site (INAPI.cl) but also technical societies, laws, and scientific publications.
• Clean up, clarify, and disambiguate all this data
• Research assistants in Santiago need a couple of months to catalog the patents and code the photos. First estimate: 60 hours/month, for 3 months for one, and 40 hrs/month for the other. This time includes training.
• Establish a long term plan for the data and the site. The prototype can stay where it is, at almost no cost. It may be wise to combine it with other historic patent data from other countries, or hand it off to the Chilean patent office, or to put it on a .cl domain. Or it could be hosted by Wikimedia DC or Wikimedia CL. At the end of the grant period we expect to have a site good enough to discuss these possibilities in a grounded way.
• We will be pleased to create Wikidata items for the granted patents in our data at the end of the project if WikiCite wants this to happen.
• Make a presentation at a WikiConference and/or academic conference (possibly after April)
• Use the database for economic history and academic publications, after the grant period.

Measures of success

What are criteria you will define success for your project, and how do you intend to measure for them? What are your targets for these measurements?

• The site should be easy and fun to search. Searches should be quick and rewarding. Discovery, e.g. of patents on a particular subject or a biography of the inventor, should be easy. Searches in Spanish are the main focus but many searches in English will be redirected usefully.
• The site should successfully host the data we know of: 3800 patent applications of the 1877-1910 period and the 2200 granted patents of the 1840-1910 period, with links to source information online at INAPI and other sources, and also to some Chilean reference works which have not been computerized.
• There will be a table of the patents and patent applications, a table of publications, and a table of persons which is mainly of the relevant patentees, engineers, government staff, and authors one needs to understand the technological developments of the time
• A glossary of the hundreds of relevant terms needed to understand the technologies patented will be on the site, with each term having its wiki page. The only notability requirement for terms or persons is that the information helps one understand the Chilean patents
• Redirects should make it simple to find the desired subject even with variant spellings.
• The data is to be permanently accessible open, sharable, downloadable, and reusable.
• While this site would not be an official external authority of the kind referred to by Wikidata, it should be the easiest way to find information about early Chilean patents and cite-able by publications and other sites.
• We expect to present this site and information from it at conferences and write a paper about it, showing the relative costs and benefits of an open wiki for such data in parallel with spreadsheets and quantitative databases.
• We anticipate follow-on projects. Experts on historic patents in Mexico, Uruguay, Peru, and Cuba might find this platform appealing if we can show it works nicely for the Chilean ones. Prof. Escobar had organized information on Chilean trademarks of the same period which could be accessible from the same site at some point. Some works can be transcribed on Wikisource in a way that will make them useful for documenting the technological and business history of Chile.

Community

Who is your target audience for this project, and how will you ? How will you engage the community you’re aiming to serve at various points during your project?

Patents appeal to a range of researchers. For historians they are primary source documents. For inventors, a source of inspiration and technology design. They are an integral part of the documentary record of national and regional history.

Our data will be available to researchers in economic and business history, the history of technology, and Chilean history. By enriching and cataloging these data we make them easier to discover, without any paywall or login requirements, and we make it possible for researchers to navigate through the data and discover connections which otherwise would have remained obscure. Therefore we expect to create a useful long-term resource which people find and use long after this phase of the project is over.

During the project:

• We will make presentations in academic contexts, to Wikimedians
• We can reach out to relevant researchers during the project, who may want to contribute or use the data.
• We can publicize the project through organizations such as the Associación Chilena de Historia Económica, of which Profesor Escobar is president.

The Budget

How you will use the funds you are requesting? List bullet points for each expense. (You can create a table or link to a separate (public) document if needed.

• Site setup, domain, maintenance, and security, telecom and other computer services in both countries: US$ 300
• 2 Terabyte drive for photos in Chile: $100
• Bank transfers from US to Chile: $100
• Uploads and site development in the US: US$ 6500
• Research assistance in Chile. 2 students, estimated cost US$ 1800. They will look in archives and libraries, take photographs of documents, and fill in data.
• Local travel in Chile, generally to the Archivo Nacional -- 20 trips @ US$ 3 per trip = US$ 60
• The principal investigators, Escobar and Meyer, will not be paid except for small reimbursements.

COVID risk assessment (for in-person events)

If the project is for an in-person event, you must complete the WMF risk assessment tool and checklist, and provide a link to copies of these documents here. Events must not include any international travel, and must follow all applicable local health guidelines.

The WMF risk assessment will be published in early-September. You may submit a draft application for in-person events before then, and edit the proposal before the submission deadline (1 October).

• The project does not include in-person events.
• The project includes visits to the National Archives of Chile and to libraries in Chile and the U.S. Some of these are closed or have restricted hours because of covid. Our intent is to follow the relevant safety regulations for visiting these institutions.
• The spreadsheet is filled out for a visit to a Chilean archive
• Document for risk assessment tool and checklist for a trip to the archive

Feedback

Community notification

You are responsible for notifying relevant communities of your proposal, so that they can help you! Depending on your project, notification may be most appropriate on a Village Pump, talk page, mailing list, etc.
Please provide links below to where relevant communities have been notified of your proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions.

• Wikimedia.cl -- We have emailed the Chilean chapter
• en.wp WikiProject Chile and WP:Intellectual property
• Wikidata's WikiProject Patents
• We expect to have opportunities to alert Chilean historians, economic historians, technology historians, and patent researchers through academic presentations and publications

Endorsements

Optional: Community members are encouraged to endorse your proposal and leave a rationale here.

• Comment: would like to see this data included in Wikimedia projects ("we will create a wiki" is unclear to me). Relevant unique information! Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 20:05, 25 September 2020 (UTC)
• Gamaliel (talk) 20:08, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
• I'm the creator of some of the extensions that would be used in this project, like Cargo, and also helped Peter a little with setup of the Inventing Aviation wiki, which covers a similar type of data. I'm very confident that Peter et al. have the ability to create this wiki, and make it user-friendly for both readers and editors. (And I'm ready to help this team out with any technical issues, if they need any help.) As a fan of open data, I'm excited that this wiki could exist - both as a national resource in its own right and as a template for other such wikis for other countries. Yaron Koren (talk) 15:58, 5 October 2020 (UTC)

Questions

Any questions about this proposal and feedback from reviewers should be placed on the associated discussion page.

Report

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Status

closed