The Reconstructed Patent Registry of Mandate Palestine Search FAQ

In the Background section, we present some overall trends. These include patent applications over the years, the applicants’ countries of origin, patents over the years in some industries, etc.

The reconstructed registry, raw data, and accompanying explanations are freely available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons License Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International (all uses are permitted, but for commercial uses, attribution is required).

The Methodology section provides a detailed description and explains how we solved various challenges.

If you are unsure about the spelling of any of the search criteria, you can submit a general search query ("application" will provide the entire dataset) and then apply the search filters on the right of the results and choose the desired criteria of the list.

• There were three channels to file patent applications in Mandate Palestine: (1) Applying directly in Palestine with a new original application; (2) Relying on an already-granted British patent; and (3) Claiming a priority date of an application filed in another country, based on it being a member of an international convention, namely, the Paris Convention. If you are interested in searching these categories, search first “application”, which will yield all patents in the dataset, then apply further filters by using the option of “Application Priority”:

British Registration means that the patent application was originally filed in the United Kingdom and subsequently refiled in Mandate Palestine.

Convention Application – If the patent application claimed priority from an earlier filing in that specific country under an international convention you will see the country name followed by “Convention Application”.

All other patents – were first submitted in Palestine.

The details for a particular patent indicate the priority country, the date of filing in the other country, and the date of the application in Palestine.

We conducted OCR in three languages: English (the most common language in the dataset), Hebrew (the second most common), and German (used in only a few applications). The accuracy of recognition varies by language, with English typically yielding the best results.  Hebrew and German documents may show a higher rate of OCR errors due to font styles and document condition.

• To enhance the usability of the database, we first OCRed the documents, and then utilized Google AI’s summarization tool to generate concise summaries for each patent application based on the OCR-processed text. These summaries provide a quick overview of the essence of the patent.

Note that the AI-generated summaries may not always be accurate. The quality of the summaries depends on the accuracy of the OCR process, which can be affected by the condition of the original documents, such as handwritten notes (and there were such notes), erasures, or original poor-quality documents. In such cases, the AI summary may be inaccurate.

We recommend treating these summaries as helpful starting points rather than definitive descriptions of the patent content. For a full and accurate understanding, we suggest that you refer to the original scanned documents and the OCR text.

The search option lists applicants according to the distribution, from the highest to lowest. The dropdown list you see contains only the first 20 most active applicants. If you know the applicant’s name, you can search for it using the regular or advanced search options.

For 34 applications (or patents), there are no files. This omission was in the original registry.

• Yes. We added tags of Kind of Product or Services. This is our categorization. You may categorize otherwise, of course.

• We categorized many inventions in more than one category.

• • There were three channels to apply for a Palestine Patent:

(1) Local application. For these there is nothing to indicate that they are in the other options.

(2) An application based on a British patent. If you wish to search for these, select “British Registration” (272 such applications)

(3) An application based on one that was submitted in a country that was a member of an international treaty, in which case the priority date was that of the foreign application. For these, you may select the countries you are interested in. Note that there were 175 such applications that cited ‘Great Britain’ as the priority country. These should not be confused with the previous channel.