INTRODUCTION
If you regularly use the EPO's free esp@cenet service (http://ep.espacenet.com/) for
international patent searching or access the EPO's premium INPADOC databases (www.european-patent-office.org/inpadoc) to
search patent families and patent status, you may be able to benefit from the
EPO's improved free searching interface called Open Patent Services. This improved searching interface
is well suited for creating customized patent databases and tracking patent
status changes.
Searching EPO databases with a web browser over the EPO's ordinary HTML webpage interface has several limitations. For example, if you automate your search with a macro or script, any change in the EPO's search forms or formatting will cause errors or disruptions. Searches that produce a lot of hits often require cumbersome manual screen by screen downloading or repeated queries. And the pages views you receive back are usually not well formatted for storage in a database or further data processing.
To overcome these limitations, the EPO now offers the option of free internet searching via its Open Patent Services (OPS) interface, an open-standards XML interface usable over most conventional HTTP internet connections. Users of OPS must purchase or develop an internet client program that meets the EPO's published OPS protocols and standards. For example, we have set up an OPS client PatServ where you can run multiple types of requests. Commercial patent searching services are expected to find this client programming relatively easy to do, and in return they can offer their customers substantially enhanced searching, downloading, and data display and storage. For example, Minesoft Products already offers a demo of its OPS-based Patent Family Portal search at www.minesoft.com/products.asp?id=P03 , and Anacubis offers trial OPS patent searching at www.anacubis.com/Products/Desktop/Services/Ops.asp .
Even end-user companies and patent firms whose data departments can only do modest open-standard XML programming should be able to follow the EPO's documentation (http://ops.espacenet.com/) to develop custom OPS clients for searching, displaying and storing patents, patent families and status. This system is ideal for batch downloading of patent information. For example, using OPS my firm was able to retrieve 75,000 separate patent documents in just two days! As a result, we have compiled PatGen, an integrated patent genetic database containing patent and bioinformatic data.
TECHNICAL DETAILS
More specifically, the EPO's OPS services enable people to freely
access bibliographic, family and legal information in highly categorized XML
format, well suited for establishing customized
database and tracking patent status changes. Well-designed web services enable
computers to communicate both services and data over very different computers
and operating systems. This system data connectively originally evolved
from applications like the Sun Microsystems' Remote Procedure Call (RPC),
Component Object Model (COM), Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) and
Common Object Broker Architecture (CORBRA).
Using XML format further
improves cross platform communication by enabling data to be represented through
extensive tagging. This makes it convenient to build web services that can
operate on top of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) used for web browsing.
Using this protocol, a server offering the service is identified by a URL
address and communication is managed by mapping procedure calls onto HTTP
requests and responses.
XML-RPC became the first web service protocol.
This is designed to encode procedure calls and has been widely used in scripting
languages like Perl, PHP and Python. SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) was created
soon after XML-RPC; this system has more functionality since it can be made more
secure, routing is possible and it does not exclusively operate with HTTP. But
to use web services effectively, many parameters need to be defined which can
get very complicated. As a result OPS supports Web Services Description Language
(WSDL) to streamline this process (see example at http://ops.espacenet.com/OpenPatentServices/OpenPatentServices.wsdl)
.
The amount and types of patent information that can be accessed through
the EPO's OPS service is extensive. Patent family, bibliographic and current
legal data is available. Bibliographic data includes the title, applicants,
European classification codes, International patent classification codes and
abstracts of both pending patent applications and issued documents. The family
information includes bibliographic and legal status of all derived family
documents. Patent documents can be accessed from 72 different countries.
Non-patent literature such as selected articles in the EPO is also
available.