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IFI Snapshots are available for the US, EPO, Australia, Canada, Germany, Spain (without claims summaries), France, and Great Britain. Japanese records also have IFI's enhanced content, although currently without standardized names, and Japan. Chinese Snapshots are available for Premium Plus subscribers only. Availability by country can be viewed in table form on the ifi-integrated-content page.
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We receive some design patents from DocDB DOCDB so there are some records with bibliographic information in the database. However, in general, we do not cover design patents, and full text is not available for these records. A quick way to find which designs are available in CLAIMS Direct is to query by kind code since all of them share kind code "S". "E" is also used for design reissues. Therefore, you would search on pnkind:(S* OR E*). You can then see the country coverage for designs by faceting your query by patent country (pnctry). For more information about how to use faceting in CDWI, see the Facet page.
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Yes. Simple family IDs, as assigned by DocDBDOCDB, are available through both CDWI and CDWS using the search field fam. IFI CLAIMS assigns a default family ID of -1 if we have not received a family ID from DocDBDOCDB. If you see this value, it means either that the record is not available in DocDB DOCDB or we have not yet received the DocDB DOCDB record. In the latter case, the family ID will be populated once we receive the DocDB DOCDB record.
Extended families are only available through CDWS. This is because the extended family can expand literally daily so it must be generated as needed. Instructions on how to access family information through the API can be found on the Family page. To access family data through an on-site instance, see Leveraging On-Site Citation and Family Functionality.
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For countries which contain IFI Snapshots, IFI calculates current legal status. This includes anticipated expiration dates, information about regulatory extensions, terminal disclaimers, and more. All of this information can be found in the ifi-patent-status container in the XML files, which can be retrieved using the Text service. For more information, see our documentation on the ifi-integrated-content.
Installation
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How do you calculate the IFI standardized form of the current assignee?
IFI curates the current assignee only for those countries for which Snapshots are available. To calculate current assignee, we use legal event data along with other sources of information. For the US and AU, we receive additional data from the patent offices, which can be found in the assignment history section of the XML. We also do some of our own rules-based work: to identify "individual" (e.g., inventor matches assignee), to standardize the names (e.g., “co” vs “company”), and to create the probable assignee on an application where one isn't present. Our editorial team also creates relationships between names, which are then used in the calculation of the ifi-name-current. For example, when Facebook became Meta Platforms, the change was quickly identified by our editors and the ifi-name-current field was updated to reflect the new name.
Do you make any changes to the data provided in the documents?
No, we do not correct or alter the data we receive from our providers except to normalize data from multiple sources into a consolidated and coherent output format and XML structure. We do report known errors to patent authorities but we do not make changes to the data unless we receive corrected records from our providers. The one exception is the IFI Snapshot data, which we calculate. IFI’s patent status and expiration indicatorsshould not be considered authoritative. An attorney or the relevant patent office should be consulted for an authoritative expiration and status determination.
What does a publication or application date of 10101 or 19000101 mean?
If no date is present in the data we receive from our providers and a document-id element exists, a default value of 00010101 (which may appear as 10101) or 19000101 is inserted. This is done because a date value is required for our processing and to facilitate Solr searching. The 00010101 date is available in Solr responses only and is not present in the XML.
Installation
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What options are available for installing CLAIMS Direct on-site?
If you want to install CLAIMS Direct on-site, we recommend three possible options: stand-alone monolithic, basic distributed, and advanced distributed installation. These are discussed on the Installation Types page.
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Yes. Please see our Step-by-Step Installation Guide. If you need are interested in our assistance with indexing the data warehouse, please contact your sales representative. For additional help, please contact us at support@ificlaims.com.
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Instructions for installing CLAIMS Direct using AWS can be found on the AWS Installation page.
Updates
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How often is the data updated?
The CLAIMS Direct update schedule can be seen on the Content Updates page.
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With hosted services, you don’t need to worry about updates. It is easy to identify newly updated records via the API. For an on-site server, there is an update process that uses a web service to retrieve data updates that are published sequentially. The server downloads the new data, updates the XML repository, and triggers a SOLR Solr indexing process if you are running that server. There are a variety of load types, but all of this and more is explained in more detail on the Content Update Architecture page.
What tools are involved in the updates?
CLAIMS Direct uses the utilities apgupd and aidxd. See Update Utilities for more information.
For information about configuring a server to process updates, see the Processing Server page.
How can I tell which records have been updated?
For on-site instances, the modified_load_id indicates the last time a record was modified and therefore can be used to track updates. This topic is discussed in more detail in the blog post Sorting Through Data Warehouse Updates.
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| file-reference-id | load-source | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 303392 | IFI-Cont | ifi-integrated-content update |
| 303372 | DOCDB | DocDB DOCDB update |
| 302363 | USREAS | Reassignment update |
| 302181 | US | Initial load |
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What web services are available from CLAIMS Direct?
The CLAIMS Direct web services Web Services provide a comprehensive API that allows for search, XML data retrieval, reporting, specialized services for family and citation lookups, and more. For a full listing and description of the services available, see CLAIMS Direct Web Servicesthe Developer's Guide.
How can I access the full text?
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The full text can also be viewed using CDWI (see Viewing the XML Record).
How can I access patent images?
Attachments are housed on a specific attachment server. You may retrieve them through the Attachments service using our API.
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wget -O- \ |
To get the first drawing (the image that normally appears with the abstract), make this abimage call:
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Some images appear to be missing from CLAIMS Direct. Is there a way to access them?
Japanese records frequently contain multi-page TIFFs. Multi-page TIFFs are indicated when multiple id attributes point to the same file. Many TIFF readers do not read any image data beyond the first IFD (image file directory). Therefore, you may see only the first page.
For example, 2007280735.tif is a multi-page TIFF containing the front page (000001), the abstract drawing (000002), and the drawing sheets (000003-000012) referenced in the drawings section of the XML:
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| Code Block | ||
|---|---|---|
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<img id="000003" he="101" wi="75" file="2007280735.tif" img-format="tif" img-content="drawing"/> <img id="000004" he="65" wi="70" file="2007280735.tif" img-format="tif" img-content="drawing"/> <!-- etc … -> <img id="000012" he="33" wi="53" file="2007280735.tif" img-format="tif" img-content="drawing"/> |
A list of viewers providing proper handling of multi-page TIFFs can be found here.
Can I see the XML DTD and schema?
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Reports can also be created through CDWI. See Report Options for instructions.
Are there limits on the API services?
IFI CLAIMS introduced shared-service quotas beginning in the third quarter of 2019. Rate limits for shared services vary based on your subscription and service levels although the standard rate limit for most shared services ranges from 60-240 request units per window per client login, where window can range from 1 minute to 1 day. You can read more about these quotas here. In addition, there are some limits applied to the individual services. The Text service has All of the API services which take multiple ucids as parameters have a limit of 100 documents per batch. That number provides a good balance between time to prepare the extract and time to push it across the network. The Citation, Family, and Attachments services can tolerate more. We do not have an upper limit for those, but suggest that you try to hold the maximum to about 500. The limit for Search and Reporting is between time to prepare the extract and time to push it across the network. The Search and Reporting services are limited to returning 30K documents per batch because deep paging can place undue stress on the system.
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The CLAIMS Direct index is created and maintained using Apache SOLR Solr (http://lucene.apache.org/solr/) and hence, based on a schema definition, all of the functionality provided by SOLR Solr is available through CLAIMS Direct, including the entire Apache Lucene query language, result set sorting, facet searching, grouping etc. For more information and examples, see the SOLR Solr Searching Guide.
The basic search syntax used in CLAIMS Direct is SOLR Solr field name:value. For example:
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Fields available for searching in CLAIMS Direct, along with tips and examples, can be seen in the SOLR Solr Search Fields section. The CLAIMS Direct SOLR Solr index does not store all text. This means that although the entire index is searchable, only certain fields are available for inclusion in a result set. Retrievable fields are marked as "stored" in the SOLR Solr Search Fields tables and a quick reference list is available in the Quick Guide to Stored Solr Fields. You can also find them in the schema where @stored="true", or use the the schema method of the Search service to inspect field attributes.
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Number formats in CLAIMS Direct are generally provided in DocDBDOCDB-normalized format with a few exceptions, which are:
WO: WIPO's format has changed over the years and you can find 3 formats in DocDBDOCDB. We have standardized WO publication numbers to WO-YYYYNNNNNN. For example, the DocDB DOCDB number WO8002869 becomes WO-1980002869-A1 in CLAIMS Direct.
US applications: The DocDB DOCDB format is YYYYNNNNNN, while the CLAIMS Direct format is US YYYYNNNNNNN.
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Before you conduct any searches, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with the searching options available in CLAIMS Direct using the SOLR Solr Searching Guide.
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For example, if you wanted to search for everything in CPC class A61K 9/2893 , the most efficient method would be to search by CPC level 5: cpcl5:A61K00092893
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Before you conduct any searches, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with the searching options available in CLAIMS Direct using the SOLR Solr Searching Guide.
How do I search for a particular applicant or assignee?
There are several fields you can use to search for an applicant or assignee. See Associated Parties for a full list of searchable parties. Many of these fields are available in various formats, including the original format as filed by the applicant and the EPO’s standardized format. More information about formats can be found on the Common XML Attributes page.
A particularly helpful field to be aware of is the pa field, which provides a comprehensive search of the applicant, assignee, and reassignee fields. We also offer search fields like asgfull which allow you to search the name and address fields together, which may help to distinguish entities with the same name in different locations.
For countries which have IFI Snapshots, we offer standardized names. As you can see on the IFI Snapshots page, we provide standardized names for the original and current assignees. Similar to the pa field, there is an ifi_pa field which provides a comprehensive search of the original and current standardized assignees. Additional information about our standardized names can be found on the ifi-integrated-content page.
Before you conduct any searches, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with the searching options available in CLAIMS Direct using the SOLR Solr Searching Guide.
Contact Us
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Still need help? Please send your questions, comments, and suggestions to support@ificlaims.com.
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