Introduction

The power stack is a unique search tool for quickly inspecting the content of multiple patent digests. Hope you find it useful.

Techniques

The workflow for Power Stack is

• move digests into the Digest Pile
• select Digest Pile digests to be included in the Basket
• When the "Power Stack" button is clicked, all Basket digests will be loaded into the Power Stack
• The ordering of the digests is significant. Order of digests can be changed on the Basket page. On the Basket page, got to "Manage". Use the priority changing features.

Example

To understand the Power Stack, simply create one. Follow these steps:

What does power stack mean?

Given a basket of patent digests, a power stack displays all the useable AND, NOT boolean combinations of the basket digests in a simple and easy to use format.

The term "power stack" is derived from the set theory concept of a power set combined with the word "stack" which connotes a prioritized grouping, i.e., a power set stacked in an orderly fashion.

Note that each member of the power set has a corresponding stack member. The stack member includes the power set subset digests PLUS the empty digests (a stack member is a unique AND / NOT combination over the basket digests)

Some theoretical aspects

In set theory, the power set is defined as the set of all the subsets of a set. The number of these subsets is 2ⁿ where n is the number of elements in the original set (the empty set is considered a subset). The power set of a set of patent digests thus has 2ⁿ elements where n is the number of digests and each element is a unique subset of the original set. The number of subsets of practical interest is 2ⁿ -1 since the empty set is of no interest in this situation.

Each of these subsets corresponds to a boolean search to yield a document set-- namely the digests present in the subset are 'AND-ed' together combined with a 'NOT' operation over the digests not in the subset to yield the documents unique to that subset. Thus a power stack display for 3 selected digests corresponds to 8-1 or 7 distinct searches. The power stack for 10 selected digests corresponds to over a thousand distinct searches.

The stacking aspect of a Power Stack is achieved by assigning a relative priority to each of the digests. Once this is done, each subset can be represented by a binary number. These binary numbers can be sorted, thus yielding a "stack" of power set subsets with the most important subsets at the top.

Notice that an individual document might be in multiple basket digests, but each individual document is in one and only one power stack pattern.