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Wednesday, October 15, 2003

EPO launches "Open Patent Services (OPS)".

As announced in the

latest issue of "epidos news", the EPO has launched a new

patent raw data service called "Open Patent Services (OPS)". OPS represents a new way of accessing patent information via the internet. Unlike the

esp@cenet service, which offers data via a rich HTML interface, OPS is a Web services application offering the same data in XML format. The service is SOAP-based (

Simple Object Access Protocol). The initial development stages of OPS have been completed and the first services offering access to the INPADOC databases (family, legal status and bibliographic data) went into production in September 2003. Additional services offering access to the remaining esp@cenet data and functions are said to be added over the course of next year. The following services are currently available from OPS: retrieval of patent family, legal and bibliographic data, with aggregates of these data types also possible. Bibliographic data is taken from the worldwide database of the esp@cenet service, and family and legal data from the INPADOC patent family searching (PFS) and legal status information (PRS) data sources.

By means of this new service, patent law firms might tailor their own patent data tools using simple standard SOAP client software.

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