Patent data is a valuable source of business, technical and legal information. The European patent office has recently begun the regular publication of bibliographic information of European patents, including the full CPC taxonomy, in linked data format with an open standard license. Data scientists, commercial providers, web developers etc. can now browse this data set, run SPARQL queries or bulk download the full data set. Linked data significantly reduces the effort of combining heterogeneous data from multiple sources and domains.
Earlier academic work was conducted to define linked data (LD) ontologies for
patents [
The presented data set from the EPO distinguishes itself by being based on a detailed patent ontology modelled with the expertise of a large patent office. The principal design goal was to maintain a broad scope so it could be used as a blueprint by other patent offices. Like the official patent publications, the represented LOD set will be updated weekly by the EPO who is the competent patent authority. 3
Linked data is a set of best practices on how to publish structured data. It builds on a set of web technologies which are defined by the W3C3, like RDF and SPARQL. Data published as linked data facilitates the merging of data sets, including independent information from other sources or organizations.
Linked open EP data is a service of the EPO comprising two published EPO data sets: Bibliographic data (i.e. the meta-data) of all EP applications and their publications including the first publications from 1978. This data set is updated weekly. The Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC)4. The data set is updated with every new CPC version.
In total, the data set contains more than 600 million triples. The target user group for this product goes beyond the typical patent expert and includes web developers and data scientists. 3.1
This data set contains the bibliographic data of EP applications and publications and their related applications and publications of other patent authorities. Bibliographic data on EP patents is quite comprehensive, whereas bibliographic data on non-EP patents is limited to basic patent identification information.
The main resources and their relationships are: About 3.2 million EP applications and their earlier filed applications, like priorities or international applications 2 lod.kipo.kr 3 www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/data 4 www.cooperativepatentclassification.org About 19 million non-EP applications which are in the same family as an EP application. Patents which are in the same family cover the same invention, but seek protection in different jurisdictions. About 5.5 million EP publications with title, abstract, applicants, inventors and legal representatives Technical classifications: CPC and IPC (International Patent Classification5) Citations to patents and non-patent literature, like scientific papers, journals, database entries or web pages Links to the full text representation of EP publications, in PDF, XML and HTML format within the EPO’s European Patent Server6
The CPC is a taxonomy with about 250 000 terms which cover the complete technical domain. Its terms are structured according to a strict hierarchy by a narrower / broader relationship. Like the older, less detailed but globally used IPC classification scheme, it is used to classify patents to facilitate patent searches. 3.2
Where applicable, linked open EP data makes use of established ontologies, like rdf/rdfs, skos, vcard and dcterms. Where necessary, new ontologies have been defined with the goal to allow easy re-usability by other patent authorities. The patent ontology currently contains 11 classes and 43 properties cpc and ipc model the technical classifications st3 corresponds to WIPO standard ST.3 7, which represents states and intergovernmental organizations. 4
The linked open EP data service can be directly accessed at http://data.epo.org/linked-data . General information, a user guide and useful resource documentation can be found on the EPO’s home page at http://epo.org/linked-data.
A download page8 allows the bulk download of all published data in N-Triples format. The ontologies files are provided in Turtle format.
The API not only resolves URIs, it also supports the Linked Data API (LDA) specification9 which permits adding parameters to the URI to 5 www.wipo.int/classifications/ipc/en/ 6 www.epo.org/publication-server 7 www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/standards/en/pdf/03-03-01.pdf 8 https://data.epo.org/linked-data/download/ filter resources sort the output and define pagination and to limit the output by pages define the output format and apply predefined views A simple browser displays the retrieved data in a tabular style for easy data and metadata exploration by human users. Clicking on the displayed resources retrieves the related resources. The format of the display of the retrieved data can also be adapted. Using curl or similar tools, any machine can send requests to the SPARQL endpoint10. A query window11 for interactive use of SPARQL is also provided. 5
The data is covered by the open standard CC-BY 4.0, which allows the use of the data without costs or registration. Attribution is required.
The use of the additional services, like API and the SPARQL endpoint is governed by a fair use policy as these services are provided for occasional use only. They allow consulting reference data, exploring the data and trying out ideas on a small scale. They are not designed to provide a backend database service for production applications. For these uses, the data must be downloaded in bulk. 6
Patent information contains business, technical and legal information which can add
value to many domains outside the patent community. Patent offices, which decades
ago published data solely on paper, now typically disseminate patent information in
csv or XML format. Going one step further to an even more open data format [
We hope that other patent offices will follow suit and create a new, much more flexible and powerful infrastructure for patent information. 9 https://github.com/UKGovLD/linked-data-api/blob/wiki/Specification.md 10 https://data.epo.org/linked-data/query 11 https://data.epo.org/linked-data/sparql.html