2020 Notes
The Names API is now available to Premium Plus subscribers. This service allows users to retrieve CLAIMS Direct IFI names and name variations as well as ultimate corporate owners and subsidiaries. More information about how to use this service is available here.
As required by the French Patent and Trademark office (INPI), we have released a patch which adds a source attribution. The patch is available through the following link:
Installation instructions and further details are included in the README file. On-site installations must apply this patch before August 1, 2020.
CLAIMS Direct now supports RHEL/CentOS 8. Instructions for new instances have been incorporated into the PostgreSQL Installation Instructions and the repository information is provided in the Software Requirements on our PostgreSQL page.
In an effort to further streamline CLAIMS Direct PostgreSQL schema versioning, we are introducing a schema and tools package into the CLAIMS Direct yum repository. The new package will offer the main CLAIMS Direct database schema as well as the supporting users database to support deployment of on-site web services. The package contains the SQL to create the database(s) supporting PostgreSQL versions 9.2 - 10.x, as well as tools to check installation, populate the tables, perform extracts, and more. See PostgreSQL Schema and Tools for more information about the package, including instructions on how to install it.
Going forward, reports created using the CDWS endpoint /reports and CDWI reporting interface will expire after 6 months and will be automatically removed. We intend to begin the pruning on June 6, 2020. Please download any reports older than 6 months that you wish to keep.
Changes
This release contains changes pertaining to how the software is deployed on the system. At the end of 2017, we moved to an RPM-based software distribution by introducing the IFI CLAIMS Direct repository. This release further aligns the installation with distribution standards. The following enhancements are included in v.2.5.3:
alexandria will be created on installation or upgrade whose home directory will be /var/lib/alexandria. alexandria.xml file for database and index settings. This file is now located in the standard system configuration directory /etc. In addition, configuration files pertaining to systemd and init.d control are located in the directory /etc/alexandria. ( /var/log/alexandria ). /var/log/alexandria/alexandria.log. systemd and init.d. apgupd.service and aidxd.service will be installed in the systemd service file directory to enable, disable, start and stop the services. For Amazon (amz1), the service files apgupd.init and aidxd.init will be installed in /etc/rc.d/init.d to enable standard chkconfig and service start, stop, restart and status commands.Upgrade Paths
Upgrading Alexandria-Client-Tools from version 2.1.1 and above (repository-controlled versions):
yum update perl-Alexandria-Library yum update perl-Alexandria-Client-Tools |
Please note there are two new configuration files |
With the deployment of the cumulative patch alexandria-sql-patch-alpa-3636-20191101, on-site CLAIMS Direct installations gained the ability to utilize family and citation functionality in-house. We are now offering a supplemental patch which will allow bulk loading of the tables needed to support these new functions. The new patch also expands the available functionality to make citation and family data easier to access. The supplemental patch is available through the following link: http://alexandria.fairviewresearch.com/software/patches/alexandria-sql-patch-alpa-3636-x-20191215.tar.gz. For a full discussion of how to use these new functions, see Leveraging On-Site Citation and Family Functionality.
We have prepared a new PostgreSQL configuration to ensure that on-site CLAIMS Direct installations are up-to-date and providing optimal performance and reliability. This is a critical update that needs to be applied to all CLAIMS Direct PostgreSQL servers. Features include:
ifi-annotated-content containerifi-keywords / ifi-statistical-information containersThe patch is available through the link below:
Inside the package, there is a README file (README.alpa-3636-20191101) describing patch application as well as notes as to what has been changed. On-site installations must apply this patch before December 1, 2019 to prevent errors in the update process.
1) We have released v2.5 of the DTD. This release includes the following changes (see the XML DTD and Schemas for more details):
classification-cpc classification-cpc unbounded (*) as child of classifications-cpc 2) The EPO has announced that CPC-International will be rolled out starting with the next DOCDB data delivery. From week 2019/36 onward all CPC classifications will have classification-scheme=“CPCI”. Classification-schemes “CPC” and “CPCNO” will be discontinued from that week onward. More information about this change can be found in Content Notifications.
3) We are releasing a new bulk attachments web service on September 1. This service is an interface to download attachments in bulk format. It is modeled on the existing XML update service which is used by on-site customers to manage updates to their CLAIMS Direct instance. Please see Bulk Attachments for full details.
In July we processed full text data from the former Soviet Union. IFI's collection now includes Author Certificates and Patents from 1924 to 1993.
Over the past few weeks we have added full text and PDF files for ARIPO, Bulgaria, Eurasia, OAPI and Romania to our Premium+ collection. Subscribers to either Premium or Premium+ also now have access to full text for Slovakia. Details can be seen in our data coverage table.
Full text and PDF files for Czech Republic (CZ) and the former Czechoslovakia (CS) are now available for Premium and Premium+ subscribers, respectively.
Following EPO recommendations, we have changed the kind codes of some NL and NO records as follows:
| Country Code | Old Kind Code | New Kind Code |
|---|---|---|
| NL | C | C1 or C2 |
| NO | A | L |
As announced in April, CS and CZ records changed the format of their patent numbers following DOCDB recommendations. Some of the changes included moving the year to the end for CZ publication numbers dating prior to 2000 and suppressing embedded zeroes for CZ publication numbers, applications, and priority numbers dating from 2000 onward. The following table illustrates the changes.
| Country Code | Kind/Year | Old Format | New Format |
|---|---|---|---|
| CS | A1, A2, A3 | YYnnnnn | (nnnnn)nYY |
| CZ | publications before 2000 | YYnnnnn | (nnnn)nYY |
| CZ | publications from 2000 onward | CCYYnnnn | CCYY(nnn)n |
| CZ | applications and priorities from 2000 onward | CCYYnnnn | CCYY(nnn)n |
The rekey, as initially described by the EPO, would have resulted in collisions. For example:
To avoid these collisions, the rekeyed ucids of 104 CS records delivered by the EPO match the application number and don't follow the rules above.
Beginning in January 2019, image files in our attachment server will include referenced images in TIFF format for ES patents and utility models.
Over the past week we have added full text and PDF files for Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Portugal, and Slovenia to our Premium+ collection. Details can be seen in our data coverage table.
We have added description, claims and full document PDFs of DD granted patents published by the former East German patent office between 1980 and 2003. This content is available to Premium and Premium+ subscription levels.
Over the past few weeks we have expanded our collection of Canadian PDFs. Although there are still a few gaps, the addition extends our Canadian PDF coverage back to publication year 2000.
In March 2018 we solved most of the issues related to the numbering format of Indian records. Since then, publication numbers of records corresponding to Indian applications published before January 2016 have a publication number format of YYYYOONNNNN in CLAIMS Direct.
We recently discovered that there were still a few records which contained the old office codes. This created some duplicates such as IN-1992BO00073-A/IN-1992MU00073-A.
In order to solve this issue we rekeyed those records with the old office codes, following the Indian patent office rules:
BO --> MU
CA --> KO
MA --> CH
Examples:
IN-1992BO00073-A is now IN-1992MU00073-A
IN-1992CA00749-A is now IN-1992KO00749-A
IN-1998MA01586-A is now N-1998CH01586-A
As a result of this process 7998 IN records have been marked "deleted".
EP kind code A4 documents cover the supplementary search reports as issued by the EPO following PCT applications entering the EP regional phase. Until now these documents were not fully integrated into the normal EPO publication flow of A and B publications.
Now A4 data is available in CLAIMS Direct both in XML format as well as PDF. So far, the entire year 2017 and the first half of 2018 are covered.
The EPO plans to deliver future A4 documents in batches every half year.
CLAIMS Direct Web Services version 3.5 was released Saturday August 25th. The following changes have been implemented in this release:
/attachment/fetchall retrieves all attachments available for a specific ucid and bundles them into a single zip archive. Please see /attachment/fetchall for service details./attachment/fetch endpoint that will convert image types to common web formats, including jpeg and png. Please see /attachment/fetch for the additional parameters.In the last few weeks, we have added full document PDFs to the following countries:
We will soon expand our coverage even further by processing PDF files for India, focusing first on applications and later adding granted patents.
We have processed a WIPO backfile of records in Asian languages. The total number of records included in this backfile with new or updated Asian language text is 211915 and the load-id is 304475. We are currently processing machine translations to English for these records.
As we announced in March, we have added English translations to EP and WO records that were filed in languages other than English.
For EP records these are the translated fields that we added:
| abstracts | 332878 |
| descriptions | 1389918 |
| claims | 859589 |
For WO records:
| abstracts | 4262 |
| descriptions | 1070417 |
| claims | 1070539 |
In the next few days, we plan to load a backfile of descriptions and claims for WO applications published in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, going back to 1978. This data will include both the original language and English translations.
CLAIMS Direct provides calculated anticipated and adjusted expiration dates for granted patents (publication-type=G ). We recently discovered that some applications (publication-type=A) contained expiry dates in the ifi-integrated-content section. To maintain data consistency, we have removed those unexpected expiry dates as of load-id 302070.
The IFI calculated status of some JP applications with kind code U was showing as expired when the correct status should have been granted. The origin of the problem was that JP laws changed around 1994 and therefore kind code U has different meanings before and after the changes. Though this was considered in IFI's calculation rules, some JP records were still being calculated incorrectly as publication-type=G when they should have been publication-type=A. This error in the publication type caused the status to be calculated incorrectly. This has now been fixed in all affected records and they have been reloaded as of load-id 302163.
In the last few days we have solved a couple of issues caused by problems in the raw data:
When processing data from the Australian national register, we found several records with OPI dates well into the future. According to the patent office, there was an issue with the optical character recognition for these dates. Although some of these dates have already been corrected, it's taking longer than expected for the patent office to fix the problem. To prevent this from happening again, we have changed these future dates to our default entry for dates that we know to be incorrect (00010101).
For most Indian patent authorities, we receive data from the Indian patent office without a publication number, so we use the application number to fill the publication reference element and to build a UCID. In general, the application reference keeps the original application number format from the patent office and the publication reference (as well as UCID) is calculated by IFI rules.
From 2016 the Indian patent office changed the format of their application numbers. The EPO also recently started to deliver Indian applications in DOCDB, but using a different number format. This created some inconsistencies in our data.
To solve this problem, we did a rekey of around 27192 records (load-id 300781).
Now, records corresponding to Indian applications published before January 2016 have a publication number format of YYYYOONNNNN:
YYYY: four-digit year
OO: two-character office code
NNNNN: sequence number zero padded to five digits
While from 2016, patent numbers will use the format YYYYOTNNNNNN:
YYYY: four-digit year
O: one-character office code (1 for Delhi, 2 for Mumbai, 3 for Kolkata, and 4 for Chennai)
T: type of application *
NNNNNN: sequence number
* type of application:
1 = Ordinary Application
2 = Ordinary-Divisional Application
3 = Ordinary-Patent of Addition Application
4 = Convention Application
5 = Convention-Divisional Application
6 = Convention-Patent of Addition Application
7 = PCT National Phase Application
8 = PCT National Phase-Divisional Application
9 = PCT National Phase Patent of Addition Application
In the first week of March, we completed an update of Brazilian records which resolves a major delay in BR front file deliveries. This included around 10,000 Brazilian full text records, which contain both the original language as well as translations. These records include full document PDFs, but are still missing bibliographic data from DOCDB since the EPO has not published them yet. We will update any information delivered by DOCDB as soon as it is available. BR full text is now up-to-date as of 20180206. Going forward, we expect to maintain front file publications within two weeks of publication.
Similarly, we are loading missing TW full text records published in the last quarter of 2017 and forward.
In parallel, we will be adding English translations to EP and WO records that were filed in languages other than English. We plan to start with EP documents filed in French or German.
We have finished the Korean backfile load announced in December, which added full text to more than 2.2 million KR documents published between 1979 and 2005. English translations will be processed soon.
Pharmaceutical names from the AU register data are now available in the new ifi-annotated-data container. See ifi-annotated-data for more information.
We are starting a reload of the ES collection to integrate machine translations. This will add English descriptions and claims to more than 370,000 records that currently contain Spanish text only. We will also be completing English translations for titles and abstracts.
Below are translation totals per field after this reload:
invention-title = 1513825
abstract = 818939
description = 370798
claims = 371645
We plan to finish this reload before January 21st.
We will soon be loading a backfile of KR full text going back to 1983 for applications and to 1979 for granted patents and utility models.
As announced in September, we have loaded AU full text and register data. More than 800,000 AU records have descriptions and claims as of today.
We also added ifi-integrated-data to AU records, as well as office-specific-data from the AU national register.
There are a few issues related to incorrect or missing paragraphs in the description text. We are in contact with our provider to solve this problem as quickly as possible.
We will soon begin loading the pharmaceutical names from the AU register data to our new ifi-annotated-data container. A patch will be required, for which you will receive instructions in advance.
The load of ifi-integrated-content for JP records has been completed with the exception of ifi-standardized-names, which will be will be added at a later time.
We have released version 2.3 of the CLAIMS Direct XML DTD. For details, see XML DTD and Schemas.
This DTD includes new elements that will shortly contain data from the Australian (AU) national register and other similar data sources in the future. We plan to begin loading the AU full text and register data at the end of September and to complete it before the end of October.
Based on recommendations from the USPTO, we recently processed patent status data from a new service called Patent Examination Data System (PEDS) and used it to recalculate the ifi-patent-status for abandoned patents. According to the USPTO, the PEDS beta version replaces the PAIR Bulk Data beta product and corrects one of the major problems with the PAIR Bulk Data beta system related to abandoned patents.
After processing this data, we realized that the PEDS status does not always match the status in the public PAIR portal. Therefore, we have contacted the USPTO regarding these discrepancies and are currently waiting for their reply. As a result, further data loads from PEDS (PAIR) to CLAIMS Direct are on hold and will depend on the stability and reliability of the data source.
Austrian applications and granted patents are now available for Premium and Premium+ subscribers as described in the data coverage table.
We would like to update you on other content improvements:
We have improved the production of Korean to English translations and were able to update 126,339 records as detailed below:
62850 titles
58002 abstracts
21650 descriptions
21842 claims
The Canadian Patent Office accepts English as well as French when applying for a patent. Machine translations to English for descriptions and claims filed in French are now available in CLAIMS Direct.
Since February of this year the attribute list for the element priority-claim contains an optional attribute linkage-type, which is related to divisions, additions, and continuations, among others. For some authorities, this is especially important when we calculate expiry dates.
From now on we are delivering the priority linkage-type codes when available.
Example: AU-2017202677-A1
<priority-claim mxw-id="PPC175612506" ucid="AU-2015050665-W" linkage-type="A" load-source="docdb">
<document-id format="epo">
<country>AU</country>
<doc-number>2015050665</doc-number>
<kind>W</kind>
<date>20151026</date>
</document-id>
</priority-claim>Regarding the backfile, we will reload records for countries where this data affects expiry dates. In this sense, reload of the NL backfile is complete as of load-id 268293.
For more information, see XML Content Description.
Premium+ subscribers now have access to full text of BR and TW documents as described in the data coverage table.
We loaded close to 1.2 million records covering TW applications, utility models and granted patents, and more than 100,000 Brazilian records.
We would like to announce an improvement in the way we calculate the patent status for EP Designated States. Our upcoming reload of EP records will incorporate the following changes:
Premium and Premium+ subscribers now have access to full text of CH applications and granted patents both in the original language and in English translation. We have updated 98,224 records published from 1980 to February of this year.
dnum-type is an attribute added to citations in order to distinguish between publication and application numbers.
In order to avoid a complete reload of patent citations, we only add the dnum-type attribute to cited applications. If no dnum-type attribute is present on the patcit element, then the citation is referencing a publication.
As a result, 77,786 records having cited applications have been reloaded. Below you can see one example:
<patcit mxw-id="PCIT377701692" load-source="docdb" ucid="CN-201420631033-U" dnum-type="application">
<document-id format="epo">
<country>CN</country>
<doc-number>201420631033</doc-number>
<kind>U</kind>
<date>20141028</date>
</document-id>
<sources>
<source name="APP" created-by-npl="N"/>
</sources>
</patcit>
We started loading the backfile of TW data in early March. Premium+ subscribers will have access to this data in the next few weeks. We plan to cover applications, granted patents, and utility models published from 2000.
Euro-PCT records reload is now complete. We solved format issues found in the original data, so there are no longer any claims with an empty num attribute in our EP collection.
This reload fixed:
Claims format: In 2016 we fixed some content-format issues in the claims section, which were wrong in the original data sources. For example, JP national data is delivered with all claims squashed into claim 1. Also we get some records without claim numbers. The two big claims reloads that we completed are: 5,763,744 JP original language claims and 1,773,963 WO claims. Total - more than 7.5 million claims fixed.
Euro-PCT records, which have the same issues as the "parent" PCT records, are going to be reloaded to fix the claims issue.
We plan to complete this reload before the end of February 2017.
Citations: DOCDB used to consolidate all citations at the earliest publication, A1 or A2 kind codes. This changed at some point last year and now citations are no longer consolidated. As a result of this change we are going to reload citations for about 14.5 million records in the upcoming weeks. This reload will fix a related issue, a former limit of 99 in the number of citations. This limit doesn't exist any more and after the reload, approximately 173,000 records will have more than 99 patent or non-patent citations.
We plan to complete this reload before the end of March 2017.
This fix affects approximately 1.1 million records from 17 authorities where we have identified duplicate citations records. This reload will eliminate these duplicate records.
We plan to complete this reload between April 1-7, 2016.
We are reloading WO records published between 1978 and 2009 in order to add original parties data including agent and correspondent which is not covered via DOCDB. In addition we will add more complete priority data and improve claims structures.
We plan to complete this load between March 7-31, 2016.
The following provides an example of the priority-claims and parties changes.
WO-2009022636-A1 before reload:
<priority-claims>
<priority-claim mxw-id="PPC87648930" ucid="JP-2007210505-A" load-source="docdb">
<document-id format="epo">
<country>JP</country>
<doc-number>2007210505</doc-number>
<kind>A</kind>
<date>20070810</date>
</document-id>
</priority-claim>
</priority-claims>
...
<parties>
<applicants>
<applicant mxw-id="PPAR364824575" load-source="docdb" sequence="1" format="epo">
<addressbook>
<last-name>ICHIKAWA CO LTD</last-name>
<address>
<country>JP</country>
</address>
</addressbook>
</applicant>
<applicant mxw-id="PPAR364813372" load-source="docdb" sequence="1" format="intermediate">
<addressbook>
<last-name>ICHIKAWA CO., LTD.</last-name>
</addressbook>
</applicant>
...
WO-2009022636-A1 after reload:
<priority-claims>
<priority-claim mxw-id="PPC159257708" load-source="patent-office">
<document-id format="original">
<country>JP</country>
<doc-number>2007-210505</doc-number>
<date>20070810</date>
</document-id>
</priority-claim>
<priority-claim mxw-id="PPC87648930" ucid="JP-2007210505-A" load-source="docdb">
<document-id format="epo">
<country>JP</country>
<doc-number>2007210505</doc-number>
<kind>A</kind>
<date>20070810</date>
</document-id>
</priority-claim>
...
<parties>
<applicants>
<applicant mxw-id="PPAR364824575" load-source="docdb" sequence="1" format="epo">
<addressbook>
<last-name>ICHIKAWA CO LTD</last-name>
<address>
<country>JP</country>
</address>
</addressbook>
</applicant>
<applicant mxw-id="PPAR364813372" load-source="docdb" sequence="1" format="intermediate">
<addressbook>
<last-name>ICHIKAWA CO., LTD.</last-name>
</addressbook>
</applicant>
<applicant mxw-id="PPAR1081843961" load-source="patent-office" sequence="1" format="original">
<addressbook>
<name>ICHIKAWA CO., LTD.</name>
<address>
<address-1>14-15, Hongo 2-chome, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 1130033</address-1>
<country>JP</country>
</address>
</addressbook>
</applicant>
---
We will reload the <application-reference> and <publication-reference> containers for approximately 3.6 million US grants. We will be adding entity-status at the publication-reference level as well as original format application-reference information. We will also fill in missing art unit (see details below).
We plan to complete this load between February 22 and Mar 7, 2016.
The reload will include the missing us-art-unit attribute for US grants from 2001-2004. Additionally we will add national application number in its original format. So for example:
US-6500018-B1 before update:
<application-reference mxw-id="PAPP61299422" ucid="US-94451301-A" us-series-code="09" load-source="docdb">
<document-id format="epo">
<country>US</country>
<doc-number>94451301</doc-number>
<kind>A</kind>
<date>20010831</date>
<lang>EN</lang>
</document-id>
</application-reference>
US-6500018-B1 after update:
<application-reference ucid="US-94451301-A" us-series-code="09" us-art-unit="2833">
<document-id mxw-id="PAPP61299422" load-source="docdb" format="epo">
<country>US</country>
<doc-number>94451301</doc-number>
<kind>A</kind>
<date>20010831</date>
<lang>EN</lang>
</document-id>
<document-id mxw-id="PAPP95329224" load-source="patent-office" format="original">
<country>US</country>
<doc-number>09944513</doc-number>
<date>20010831</date>
<lang>EN</lang>
</document-id>
</application-reference>
In the case of entity-status, this will be added to the publication reference.
Example of new entity-status attribute in US-7318729-B2:
<publication-reference fvid="75564347" ucid="US-7318729-B2" entity-status="small">
<document-id>
<country>US</country>
<doc-number>7318729</doc-number>
<kind>B2</kind>
<date>20080115</date>
<lang>EN</lang>
</document-id>
</publication-reference>
We have identified about 2.5 million JP records that were "re-keyed" to fix their publication numbers. The new records were loaded, however the old records were never marked deleted. These effectively duplicate records will be reloaded and marked deleted between February 13-17, 2016.
See XML DTD and Schemas (released: Oct 19, 2015). Changes to the actual data will not begin publishing until November 30, 2015.
See CLAIMS Global Data Coverage (released: Oct 19, 2015)
See Custom Service Providing Application-Centric Integrated View TWS
See Reporting
See Citations
See Family
IFI CLAIMS has recently added patent status, standardized names, and claims summaries for selected countries. This value-added data provides an overall Snapshot of the highlights of a given patent document and can be found in the ifi-integrated-content XML container. For more information about IFI Snapshots, including coverage, please see ifi-integrated-content. A patch is required to access the IFI Snapshots.