epo-ops

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

Usage

Quickstart

Simply install this gem and start a ruby console.

$ gem install epo-ops
$ irb

and start querying the API

require 'epo_ops'

patent_application = EpoOps::PatentApplication.find("EP14731659")
patent_application.title  # "DEVICE AND METHOD FOR INTRODUCING FIBRES INTO AN EXTRUDER"
patent_application.classifications # ["B29C47/10", "B29C47/68", "B29C47/92", "B29C45/00", "B01D46/24"] 
patent_application.applicants.first.name # "Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V."

Advanced Usage

OAuth

EPO offers an anonymous developer access to their API with very little quota. To get extended quotas you can register an account at the EPO for OAuth

After your account has been approved configure your credentials


EpoOps.configure do |conf|
  conf.authentication = :oauth
  conf.consumer_key = "YOUR_KEY"
  conf.consumer_secret = "YOUR_SECRET"
end

The temporary access token is kept in memory for subsequent retrievals. To share this between several processes the token storage strategy may be changed as shown in epo/ops/token_store for redis.

Querying and searching patent applications

Currently this gem focuses mostly around patent applications. It is possible to search for specific applications by application number and to search for applications using a CQL search query

For example to find all applications in IPC Class A01 (and all subclasses) that were updated on 2016-01-01

query = EpoOps::SearchQueryBuilder.build("A01", Date.parse("2016-01-02"))
applications = EpoOps::PatentApplication.search(query)
puts applications.count # 1234
applications.map {|application| puts application.application_nr } # print all application numbers
applications.map {|application| application.fetch} # fetch complete bibliographic data for each document

The Request will return a search result containing the number of all applications matching the search. By default the search will return 10 documents (max is 100). You can use start_rang and end_range of EpoOps::SearchQueryBuilder.build to page through all results

Note: EPO will always only return up to 2000 documents even if the search would return more

Search for all Patents on a given Date

To circumvent the restriction of max 2000 search results this gem offers a convenient method to search for all patents updated on a given date and/or a given IPC class

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

You can now retrieve the bibliographic entries of all these:

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

Note: 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 exceed your limits.

Development

This gem is still an early version and it is far from covering the whole API. If you are interested to include different API endpoints than the register it should be easy to include those and we are happy to accept pull requests.