Content
What data do you provide?
A complete list of our data coverage by country, year, and kind can be found in our Data Coverage table. You can also use this table to see which countries have full-text data and images, as well as what languages are available for each country. Note that coverage will differ based on your subscription level.
Do you provide patent images?
Yes. We provide full-page PDFs, clipped images, drawings, chemistry files, and other non-textual files delivered by patent offices. Access to the images will differ depending on your subscription level. Please see the Data Coverage table to see what types of images are available for specific countries. For more information about the types of images available and how to access them, see the Attachment Server Description and Coverage page.
Which countries have IFI's enhanced content, such as patent status, expiry dates, standardized names, and claims summaries?
The ifi-integrated-content is 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. Availability of the IFI container can be viewed in table form on the ifi-integrated-content page. Note that access will differ based on your subscription level. In general, if you have access to the full text data for a particular country, then you will also have access to the IFI enhanced data for that country.
Do you have PAIR/PEDS data?
PAIR/PEDS data is available through the Legal Status service of our API. This service provides transaction histories from PEDS which, according to the USPTO, may lag behind Public PAIR by a few days. Since this service is currently BETA, request parameters and response formats may change.
Do you have design patents?
We receive some design patents from 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 what 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.
Do you have provisional patents?
US provisional patents are only available in CLAIMS Direct if they have been published by the USPTO. Provisional patents are generally not published, so they are rarely available in CLAIMS Direct. When a US provisional patent is transformed to a "normal" patent, then it is published. The new patent will have different publication and application numbers, but the application number of the provisional patent is always included in the priority data of any member of the family. This application number is the one with a P as kind code. You can find them by querying ankind:P AND anctry:US. Other countries can work differently. Some of them publish provisional patents, like Australia. Also, the effect of a provisional patent can be different in different countries.
How long does it take for translations to become available?
Our translations often do not appear concurrently with the newly published documents for a couple of reasons. For many countries, translations arrive through a service separate from the original application or grant. You can see the breadth of those on the CLAIMS Direct Load Sources page.
Our typical delivery schedule, including the timing of translations, may be found on the Content Updates page. The applications and grants essentially need to be published as soon as they’re ready due to the significance of that publication. As a practical matter, the publication cannot be held back while waiting for translation.
Do you provide citations?
Yes. CLAIMS Direct provides forward and backward citations, including patent and non-patent literature citations. The patent citations may be accessed using our Citation Service. Citations are also searchable in CDWI. Visit the Citations page to see which search fields are available. For more information about the citation data, see technical-data citations.
Do you provide patent family information?
Yes. Simple family IDs, as assigned by DocDB, are available through both CDWI and CDWS using the search field fam. Note that IFI CLAIMS assigns a default family ID of -1 if we have not received a family ID from DocDB. If you see this value, it means either that the record is not available in DocDB or we have not yet received the DocDB record. In the latter case, the family ID will be populated once we receive the DocDB record.
Extended families are only available through CDWS. The reason is that 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.
How can I tell if a patent is still in force or what its current status is?
We get legal status data for EP patents from the EPO's subscription product, INPADOC. It is available in the legal-status container of the XML files.
We also provide USPTO PAIR data through the API's Legal Status service. However, this service is currently BETA so request parameters and response formats may change.
For countries which contain IFI's enhanced content, 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
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.
Do you provide instructions for on-site installation?
Yes. Please see our Step-by-Step Installation Guide. If you need additional help, please contact us at support@ificlaims.com.
How can I install CLAIMS Direct using AWS (Amazon Web Services)?
Instructions for installing CLAIMS Direct using AWS can be found on the AWS Installation page.
Updates
How often is the data updated?
The CLAIMS Direct update schedule can be seen on the Content Updates page.
How are updates delivered?
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 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 more 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.
In the XML, there are two ways to tell if a document has been updated:
@statusattribute on thepatent-documentelement@file-reference-idattribute on thepatent-documentelement
If you want to see at a glance whether a document has been updated, use the @status attribute. If you are persisting the data, you should be storing the file-reference-id which can then be used to flag or recognize updates.
For example, this sample record has been updated a few times since publication:
| file-reference-id | load-source | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 303392 | IFI-Cont | ifi-integrated-content update |
| 303372 | DOCDB | DocDB update |
| 302363 | USREAS | Reassignment update |
| 302181 | US | Initial load |
You can see that the file-reference-id of an update will have a larger integer than the original delivered value.
Are updates received only for active patents or is it possible to receive an update for any patent?
Most updates affect patents that haven't expired yet or have expired recently, but there are some exceptions. For example, if there is a change in a CPC class that affects records related to a specific class code, then all records with that class code would be updated, whether they are expired or not.
Using CLAIMS Direct
What web services are available from CLAIMS Direct?
The CLAIMS Direct 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 Services.
How can I access the full text?
The Text service is used to retrieve XML data from the CLAIMS Direct Data Warehouse.
To access the full text through SQL, use the following command:
SELECT xml.f_patent_document( xml.f_ucid2id(‘US-5551212-A’), null );
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.
To get PDFs, you can make this call with just the ucid:
wget -O- \ |
To get the first drawing (the image that normally appears with the abstract), make this abimage call:
|
Note that not all documents have PDFs or abstract images, so your application should check for errors.
To get all of the attachments, you can request the full list of available attachments:
|
This will return a list (in JSON) of the available attachments, and links to fetch them. The file names should correspond with the figure references in the document.
You can also see PDFs and attachments in CDWI. Do a search and produce a list of documents. Right click on a document and render "PDF" or “Attachments”. For attachments, you will see a list of available attachments and can click to open them. For biological and chemical patents, there are sometimes .MOL (molecule files) and .SEQ (genetic sequence files).
Can I see the XML DTD and schema?
Yes. The DTD and schema are available here.
How do I create a report?
Our Reporting service allows you to create, process, and retrieve either CSV extracts or XML extracts from CLAIMS Direct.
Reports can also be created through CDWI. See Report Options for instructions.
Are there limits on the API services?
Generally, the Text service does benefit from a limit of about 100 documents per batch. That number seems to provide 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 do suggest that you try to hold the maximum to about 500. The limit for Reporting is 30K documents per batch because deep paging can produce odd results.
Is there any time when CLAIMS Direct's services are not available?
We have a regular maintenance window on Saturdays from 12:00-4:00pm Eastern Standard Time during which there may be brief service interruptions. If we have extended outages, a notification will appear on the Service Notifications page.
Searching
What search rules and syntax are used in CLAIMS Direct?
The CLAIMS Direct index is created and maintained using Apache SOLR (http://lucene.apache.org/solr/) and hence, based on a schema definition, all of the functionality provided by 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 Searching Guide.
The basic search syntax used in CLAIMS Direct is SOLR field name:value. For example:
cpc:a61k |
You can find more information about how to search using the API in the Developer's Guide.
For instructions on how to search using the CLAIMS Direct Web Interface (CDWI), see the CDWI guide.
What fields are available for searching?
Fields available for searching in CLAIMS Direct, along with tips and examples, can be seen in the SOLR Search Fields section. Note that the CLAIMS Direct 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 Search Fields tables. You can also find them in the schema where @stored="true", or use the schema method of the Search service to inspect field attributes.
How do I search for a particular patent number?
There are several ways to search for a particular patent number in CLAIMS Direct. You would use the an field to search for an application number, and pn to search for a patent number. You may also search for a ucid, which is a unique document identifier comprised of the country, document number, and kind code, e.g., US-96142365-A.
Number formats in CLAIMS Direct are generally provided in DocDB-normalized format with a few exceptions, which are:
WO: WIPO's format has changed over the years and you can find 3 formats in DocDB. We have standardized WO publication numbers to WO-YYYYNNNNNN. For example, the DocDB number WO8002869 becomes WO-1980002869-A1 in CLAIMS Direct.
US applications: The DocDB format is YYYYNNNNNN, while the CLAIMS Direct format is US YYYYNNNNNNN.
Patent document numbering is a complex subject, however, so you should review the following pages for more detailed information: application-reference and publication-reference.
If you have a list of numbers to search, you may use the List search option in CDWI, which you can read about here. This option includes a validation feature which will convert some patent publication numbers into CLAIMS Direct's standard ucid format.
Before you conduct any searches, we recommended that you familiarize yourself with the searching options available in CLAIMS Direct using the SOLR Searching Guide.
How do I search for a particular class or subclass?
CLAIMS Direct allows searching for Collective Patent Classification (CPC), International Patent Classification (IPC and IPCR), FI classification/F-Terms, US Classification, and European Classification (ECLA).
Our system allows searching by level. For IC, CPC, FI and ECLA, the different levels of classifications are indexed as follows:
l1=section, e.g., A
l2=section+class, e.g., A61
l3=section+class+subclass, e.g., A61K
l4=section+class+subclass+group, e.g., A61K0001
l5=section+class+subclass+group+subgroup, e.g., A61K0001001
For US classification, the different levels are indexed as follows:
l1=class, e.g., 161
l2=class+subclass (as integral number), e.g., 161234
l3=class+subclass with trailing decimal if exists, e.g., 161234 [.xxx] -->
So, 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
The search fields are listed, along with examples, on the Classifications page. More information about the classification data can be found here.
Before you conduct any searches, we recommended that you familiarize yourself with the searching options available in CLAIMS Direct using the 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 that 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’s enhanced data, we offer standardized names. As you can see on the IFI Integrated Data 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 recommended that you familiarize yourself with the searching options available in CLAIMS Direct using the SOLR Searching Guide.
Contact Us
Still need help? Please send your questions, comments, and suggestions to support@ificlaims.com.