The CLAIMS Direct data warehouse is updated continuously. On average, 1-3% of the entire database is touched weekly. These 1-3 million updates fall into two categories: new documents (roughly 20%) and updated documents (roughly 80%).  New documents are, of course, new publications from issuing authorities, US, EP etc. Updates are generally, but not limited to, CPC changes, family changes (adding family ID), IFI integrated content (patent status, standard names and claims summaries), reassignments, legal status, et al. I suggest reading about content updates for a better understanding of load sources and issuing authorities. This blog will describe how to determine what has been updated and further, differentiating new content from updated content at the document level as well as container level.

Load Identifiers

As described in the content update documentation,

...

select count(*) as docs_with_modified_cpc
from xml.t_patent_document_values as a
  inner join xml.t_classifications_cpc as b
    on (a.publication_id=b.publication_id)
where a.country='US'
  and a.published='2016-10-04'
  and a.deleted_load_id is null -- disregard deleted documents
  and a.withdraw != true        -- disregard withdrawn documents
  /*
    If b.modified_load_id > a.created_load_id,
    the table has been touched and we can therefore
    assume CPC values have been modified
  */
  and b.modified_load_id > a.created_load_id;
 
 docs_with_modified_cpc 
------------------------
                   6145

Reporting

Knowing which tables and containers have changed is important, but the when and why are also critically important. The information gathered during data warehouse updates is stored in reporting.t_client_load_process. For a detailed description of the contents of this table, see CLAIMS Direct Design Documentation. Of the many questions that can be posed, for our purposes in this blog, we are only concerned with answering the following questions:

...