epo-ops

Ruby interface to the EPO Open Patent Services (OPS).

The EPO provides playground, where you can try out the methods. As well as Documentation of the different endpoints and detailed usage (see the 'Downloads' section).

Usage

Authentication

In order to use this gem you need to register at the EPO for OAuth. Use your credentials by configuring

Epo::Ops.configure do |conf|
  conf.consumer_key = "YOUR_KEY"
  conf.consumer_secret = "YOUR_SECRET"
end

Quickstart

Search for Patents

Get references to all Patents on a given date and IPC-class:

Epo::Ops::Register.search("A", Date.new(2016,2 ,3))
# or for all ipc classes
Epo::Ops::Register.search(nil, Date.new(2016,2 ,3))

You can now retrieve the bibliographic entries of all these:

references = Epo::Ops::Register.search(nil, Date.new(2016,2 ,3))
references.map { |ref| Epo::Ops::Register.biblio(ref) }

This will return an object that helps parsing the result. See the documentation for more information

Note that both operations take a considerable amount of time. Also you may not want to develop and test with many of these requests, as they can quite quickly excess the API limits. Also note that this methods use the application endpoint.

Custom Retrieval

#raw_search

This allows you to build your own CQL query, as described in the official documentation. With the second parameter set to true you can get the raw result as a nested Hash, if you want to parse it yourself.

Epo::Ops::Register.raw_search("q=pd=20160203 and ic=D&Range=1-100", true)

#raw_biblio

If you do not want to retrieve via the application endpoint (say you want publication) this method gives you more fine-grained control. Make sure the reference_id you use matches the type.

Epo::Ops::Register.raw_biblio('EP1000000', 'publication')