News Article

Saarbrücken and Munich The European Patent Office has embedded a RealObjects' Martha-based XHTML editor into Trimaran, a major application deployed to 4000 patent examiners.

Though written communication between EPO patent examiners and their counterparts, patent attorneys or inventors, takes place within a clear procedural framework ruled by patent law, a large editorial freedom has to be given to the examiners. Each patent application may lead to the examiner having to write several pages of individually-tailored, case-specific technical and legal argumentation. This "free text" has to be combined with patent procedural data items and inserted into predefined forms. This writing task is supported by the new editor Martha.

Martha forms part of Trimaran, a major JAVA application for examiners which has been deployed over the period 2009-2010. This new editor had to provide EPO-specific functionality and yet still behave like the off-the-shelf editors that people are familiar with.

Please also read the related case study.

About the EPO

The EPO has been serving inventors and companies in Europe since 1977. Today, the EPO is the second largest European organisation with 6700 employees from some 30 nations at five sites in four countries. The EPO was established to improve co-operation on the protection of inventions within Europe. Under the European Patent Convention you can now obtain patent protection in up to 38 countries by filing a single application in any of the three official languages, English, French or German.

About RealObjects

Headquartered in Saarbrücken, Germany, RealObjects is a manufacturer of standards-oriented, cross-platform software tools for content authoring and electronic publishing. The company ranks as a pioneering developer of easy-to-use, affordable and quick-to-deploy WYSIWYG HTML/XHTML/XML editor solutions, which enable content authoring in Web- and Java-based applications.

The privately-held software company has more than 2000 corporate customers in over 30 countries, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 enterprises, educational institutions as well as government and non-profit organizations. RealObjects has a strong network of key business alliances, value added resellers and OEM partners.