"Patents are the treasury of knowledge that drives the modern economies. The support of targeted search in this treasury has increasingly been topic of research. But search is just the first stage that provides the “raw” material that is to be analyzed, digested, assessed and summarized, depending on the concrete task of the user. Due to the wide-reaching consequences when a relevant patent remains undiscovered during search, patent search traditionally aims at high recall at the cost of lower precision, such that this raw material tends to contain many more irrelevant hits than in a general discourse search – with patent specialists reviewing mainly manually large quantities of patents in each phase of the search procedure. This is time consuming, expensive and often with a less than optimal outcome. TOPAS aims to bring to the market of IPR protection and management a new product that will provide high quality automatic means for content analysis and summarization of patent material, which will support the patent specialists in their daily work, leading to a much cheaper and better performance of the tasks. It will significantly contribute to the competitiveness of the work faced by any innovation-oriented company with an IPR agenda, and in particular, by the clients of the SME’s products: patent departments within companies, patent lawyers and innovators. The preparatory work for the development of the TOPAS technologies has been carried out in the FP6 project PATExpert, with the participation of three partners of the Consortium.The benefits will originate from the integration of functionality requested by clients for targeted and efficient IPR protection into the existing product lines SME’s, allowing for direct commercialization by SME’s together with their products already established at the market. The benefits will be fully passed on to the clients of the SMEs, who will be able to considerably reduce the time and costs they allocate to IPR protection."