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Welcome to your trial of our global patent database, CLAIMS Direct. This document covers methods that you can use to explore our content with the CLAIMS Direct Web Interface (CDWI). CDWI allows you to run queries and export data for you to evaluate.
Our data is delivered in a consistent XML format generated from 70+ sources of patent content. This trial will allow you to preview both the standard bibliographic data and the value-added features included in our IFI Snapshots such as name standardizations, expiration date calculations, and patent status.
In addition to providing an XML archive, CLAIMS Direct provides a fully indexed searchable database utilizing Apache Solr. We have included a few examples in this guide that you can run to see its advanced features.
In preparation for your trial, a representative from IFI Technical Support will contact you via email with user credentials. Within the same email, you will find URLs for our management console and web service portal. Both services point to a full, shared instance of CLAIMS Direct. If your credentials have not arrived via email, please contact support@ificlaims.com to have them resent.
Before diving into the data, we recommend that you review CLAIMS Global Data Coverage, which provides a detailed description of our patent content and its sources. Note that coverage will differ depending on your subscription level.
All written resources can be found at docs.ificlaims.com. In this guide, we’ll provide a few links that will be relevant to the examples being demonstrated.
There are millions of patents published annually around the world, with new ones introduced every week. Reviewing all of them is not realistic, but you can look at samples. The easiest way to see what data is available and to generate data samples is through CDWI. A short video introduction to CDWI is available here.
Within CDWI, content may be retrieved by either requesting specific patent numbers or through a query.
The List search option allows you to search for document numbers (the ucid field) singly or in bulk.
Note that EP1799450 resulted in three potential matches. Multiple results are indicated by a small arrow to the left of a document number. Click on the arrow to see the potential matches.
Step by step:
You should see the search result. Note that the default display shows the latest publication date first. The search results are paged, so you may want to page through the results.
6. To view the XML from a single patent, double click on its row.
The CDWI Query screen can be seen on the left side of the search page:
Enter your search criteria into the "Query(q)" box using the following format: field name:value
Example: cpc:a61k |
Note: When no field name is specified in the query, the search is directed to the title, abstract, description, and claims fields.
Placing a query in the “Filter(fq)” box restricts the set of documents returned by the standard query. There are two advantages to using the filter query rather than including the restriction with your standard query: (1) The filter query does not affect the ranking score, and (2) It can increase the speed of complex queries since the filter query results are cached.
("autonomous vehicle" OR "self driving vehicle") AND signal* |
With no field name provided, CDWI will search the title, abstract, description, and claims fields.
pa:"Xenon Pharmaceuticals" AND pnctry:US |
Searches for patents published in the US with Xenon Pharmaceuticals in the Assignee field.
Note: Assignee is the term used by the USPTO for the owner of the patent. Other patent authorities may use other terminology.
cpcl3:G06F AND flags:(has_ttl_en AND has_ab_en AND has_clm_en) |
Searches for patents with the classification code of G06F as well as English titles, abstracts, and claims.
Note: Use the flags field to search for documents that contain data within the listed indexed fields. The syntax is flags:has_[Solr Indexed Field Name].
"半導体装置" OR "반도체 장치" |
Searches for the term “semiconductor device” in Japanese and Korean.
CDWI provides a Facet capability to arrange search results into categories based on indexed terms. Faceting may be used to get a count of patents based on specific field data. A video that illustrates data faceting and reporting is available here.
The Faceting options can be seen in the Facet tab on the right side of the CDWI search page:
Step by step:
Note: The number of rows displayed is determined by the value specified in the Limit box on the upper Facet tab.
Developers will be interested in the CLAIMS Direct Architecture page. This page contains links to the XML DTD and data warehouse design.
The XML content is broken into sections – or “containers”. These can be collapsed and expanded when viewed in your browser.
Example: US-8141074-B2 – “Packaging files having automatic conversion across platforms”.
To view this patent formatted for readability, please see Google Patents US-8141074-B2.
The first line of the XML is defined by brackets (<>). It contains basic information about the patent.
ucid: Unique document identifier based on country, doc-number, and kind.
family-id: DOCDB-assigned simple family identifier. The default value is "-1".
The IFI Snapshots contain our unique value-added features. The fields listed below are examples of the features with a brief description of each.
ifi-patent-status anticipated-expiration – 20230807
IFI CLAIMS calculates the anticipated expiration date according to the patenting authority and document kind. The date reflects the maximum life of the patent assuming maintenance fees are paid and term extensions are not in place.
ifi-patent-status description – Active
The current patent status is calculated by sequential analysis of the INPADOC legal status events (or events from our Chinese data source in the case of China). It is recalculated when an update is received.
ifi-standardized-name – International Business Machines Corp
IFI CLAIMS identifies the standardized form of the applicant/assignee name provided when the document was originally published.
ifi-standardized-name-current – Facebook Inc
IFI CLAIMS identifies the standardized name of the current assignee based on the reassignments from the patent authorities.
ifi-claims-summary – total=”5” independent=”5”
IFI CLAIMS identifies the number of claims in the document and whether those claims are independent or dependent.
When you look at documents that have been translated, you will see both the original language and the English language translation (excluding Chinese at Premium level).
Note: Where elements are translated, all the like elements (e.g. claims) will be listed first in the original language and then in English.
The full list of XML attributes used in CDWI can be found here.
You can use CDWI to generate an XML sample containing multiple records.
Step by Step:
To compare documents, we suggest using the Reporting feature to export documents in CSV format that can easily be presented in a tabular format for content evaluation.
Step by Step:
In this section of the documentation, we examine a few of the more complex capabilities of the CLAIMS Direct Solr indexing. These features may not be present within your organization’s installation of CLAIMS Direct, based on whether your organization installs our Solr index. Our Solr index is not necessarily required for your use case.
A numerical value may be assigned to a word or a phrase to emphasize its importance in relation to another word or phrase.
Boost search terms by appending the caret character (^) followed by a positive number to query clauses. The query string below illustrates how to apply query boosting:
("autonomous vehicle"^0.1 AND "collision avoidance"^1.0)
The term “collision avoidance” will have 10 times the relevance ranking weight as the term “autonomous vehicle”.
Note: Scores are always normalized to fall between 0 and 1.0.
By default, search results are sorted by publication date with the most recent document returned first. Results may instead be shown ranked by relevance to the search query.
Step by Step:
Note: See General Search Parameters for more information
The Result Grouping option categorizes documents with a common field value and returns the top documents for each category. Fields available for grouping include fam (family) and anucid (filing identifier). Grouping may be used to clearly display patent families.
Step by step:
The output from the Solr-based CLAIMS Direct Search service is standard Solr JSON, whether the search was executed from CDWI or from our API. Therefore, you may execute a search in CDWI, then view the underlying JSON output as it would be returned from an API call.
Step by step:
The CLAIMS Direct Web Services are documented in detail here. You can run the API using “wget” on a Windows machine at the command prompt. wget is a free, commonly used utility that can be installed on Windows machines.
Note: You will need to insert your IFI-supplied username and password into the commands.
Two wget examples