Error for documents having large number of family members

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RohiniTuraga
Posts: 7
Joined: Wed Aug 14, 2013 10:52 am

Error for documents having large number of family members

Post by RohiniTuraga » Wed Feb 19, 2014 11:12 am

Hi,

We are currently using RESTful services 3.1 version for INPADOC family retrieval (family-and-legal-and-biblio-retrieval). Please see below the error logs in the response that i retrieved from OPS for publication number CN101563098A. But this document is having 597 family members in it.

04:20:20(02/19) DEBUG com.lxnx.ols.tp.search.model.FamilyInfoService : Response retrieved from OPS after REST request is sent : {X-RegisteredQuotaPerWeek-Used=[629910313], Cache-Control=[proxy-revalidate], Server=[Apache], X-IndividualQuotaPerHour-Used=[444], Content-Type=[application/xml], Connection=[Keep-Alive], X-API=[ops-v3.1], Content-Length=[222], Date=[Wed, 19 Feb 2014 09:20:38 GMT], Content-Language=[en], X-Throttling-Control=[idle (images=green:200, inpadoc=green:60, other=green:1000, retrieval=green:200, search=green:30)], null=[HTTP/1.1 413 Request Entity Too Large]}
04:20:20(02/19) DEBUG com.lxnx.ols.tp.search.model.FamilyInfoService : Error in FamilyInfoSerivce.getOPSFamilyAndLegalAndBiblioRetrieval() while retrieving response : <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><fault xmlns="http://ops.epo.org"> <code>SERVER.LimitedServerResources</code> <message>Please request bibliographic data in smaller chunks</message></fault>

Not only for this document, we are facing the similar issue for few other documents as well, which are having large number of family members for them. From the OPS document i can see
"In situations when the requested family is very large (several hundred members), all of
the members cannot be included in the response due to technical reasons. The patentfamily
structure is returned with attribute truncatedFamily="true" and only a
limited number of family members are returned." So, if the issue that we are facing is becuase of large family members, doesn't OPS provide atleast few family members in the response with truncated family attribute as true. Can you please let us know why are we facing this issue.

Please see below the request headers and request body that we sent to OPS.

Request URI : http://ops.epo.org/3.1/rest-services/fa ... blio,legal
Headers :
Content-Type : application/ops+xml
Authorization : "Bearer " + accessToken
Method : POST

Request Body : CN.101563098.A

Thanks,
Rohini


EPO / OPS Support
Posts: 1298
Joined: Thu Feb 22, 2007 5:32 pm

Re: Error for documents having large number of family member

Post by EPO / OPS Support » Wed Feb 19, 2014 1:21 pm

Dear user,

For truncated families you should only search for legal information (constituent legal) without adding biblio:
http://ops.epo.org/3.1/rest-services/fa ... 98.A/legal

For biblo you have to use a workaround: look for a family larger than simple family but smaller than INPADOC, have a look at priorities and then search for those new priorities in Published services in OPS. In this way, all the documents sharing specific priority should be found.

Kind regards,
OPS support


RohiniTuraga
Posts: 7
Joined: Wed Aug 14, 2013 10:52 am

Re: Error for documents having large number of family member

Post by RohiniTuraga » Thu Feb 27, 2014 8:39 am

Thank you for the reply. Can you please help us with below :

1) How to know if the document will have more number of family members in it without sending the request to OPS at first? So, the procedure that need to be followed is as follows :
a) Request OPS for the document.
b) After retrieving the response if the response is as below, then request OPS twice (Once for Legal and next for Biblio).
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><fault xmlns="http://ops.epo.org"> <code>SERVER.LimitedServerResources</code> <message>Please request bibliographic data in smaller chunks</message></fault>

Please let me know if my understanding is correct?

2) How many number of minimum family members should be in the document to get "truncatedFamily='true'" in the response?

3) Also i didnot completely understand about the work around that you have suggested for retrieval of biblio. Can you please elaborate it. Can i get any document about it with complete details or examples? I didnot see any description related to it in OPS document. I am referring to the latest version.

Thanks,
Rohini Turaga


EPO / OPS Support
Posts: 1298
Joined: Thu Feb 22, 2007 5:32 pm

Re: Error for documents having large number of family member

Post by EPO / OPS Support » Thu Feb 27, 2014 2:05 pm

Dear user,

Family will only be truncated when it has over 700 members (please note that there will be a difference between number of members in Espacenet and in OPS - Espacenet will group different publications stages of certain family member into one family entry and OPS will give you every pub. stage as new family entry).
For extended families up to 100 members you should get biblio and legal info in one query.

I don't think there is a way of knowing how big a family is without doing a request first.

Also, the question is are you REALLY interested in biblio and legal status of over 700 family members of one single patent?? Usually this is not the system that any examiner so professional searcher will do. But if you still insist on doing queries of biblio you can extract all publication numbers from your first "legal"query and then you can use POST method in Published services with constituent Biblio and load batches of 100 biblio's (for 700 family members you will need 7 batches).

I can not do any sample for you because I can not do any POST request from where I am.

The real question is if this really makes sense to you and that always depends on specific needs of the person who requires this data.

For equivalents or simple patent family, you anyway have to use Published Services with constituent Equivalent in order to get only Docdb (simple) family members which means only publications sharing exactly the same priority with all other publications in the family and cover same invention. Simple patent family will never be truncated because it can not really have 700 members (at least not in theory).

Searches you are doing in Legal search are for extended INPADOC family which gives you family members that share at least one priority with at least one member and cover same technical content. With every newly added document into our database the chances are that Inpadoc family picture will change so even if you download all family members today, next Monday there can be a change in a patent family again and new family members will appear.

Kind regards,
OPS support


sachin
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Jan 13, 2015 10:49 pm

Re: Error for documents having large number of family member

Post by sachin » Wed Jan 14, 2015 5:26 pm

Hi OPS Support,

Continuing the above discussion which my team mate Rohini started. Recently, TotalPatent users have reported that for many publication numbers we are not able to pull the INPADOC information. On analysis i found that we are seeing below error returned by OPS even though the number of family members on these are way lesser than even 300:

<fault xmlns="URL removed">
<code>SERVER.LimitedServerResources</code>
<message>
Please request bibliographic data in smaller chunks
</message>
</fault>


The publication numbers identified so far are:

1. WO2011049758 (Family members 87)
2. US8603160 (Family members 172)
3. US8642001 (Family members 218)


Can you please help me know why we are not able to pull the "biblio" information for these pubs?

Thanks for your help.

~Sachin


EPO / OPS Support
Posts: 1298
Joined: Thu Feb 22, 2007 5:32 pm

Re: Error for documents having large number of family member

Post by EPO / OPS Support » Mon Jan 19, 2015 2:55 pm

Dear user,

Last week we had to introduce a rapid change involving the requests of type "family and biblio".

The amendment relates to specific requests for families with (currently - can change in the future) more than 50 family members. In this case, it is no longer possible to get a family request with biblio.

The error message is not very helpful at this moment and I'll try as soon as possible to improve / change it.

The workaround with big families is to:
- First to get the list of family members as a "pure" family request
- Then make Biblio request in Published Services, with max. 100 documents per request to obtain the respective bibliographies gradually.

Kind regards,
OPS support


brevett
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Feb 26, 2015 10:50 am

Re: Error for documents having large number of family member

Post by brevett » Thu Feb 26, 2015 10:59 am

This is very interesting and of assistance to the users, thanks!


sachin
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Jan 13, 2015 10:49 pm

Re: Error for documents having large number of family member

Post by sachin » Thu Feb 26, 2015 5:35 pm

Thanks OPSSupport,

Can you please point me to any documentation(API) which will help me to imlement the below workaround?

The workaround with big families is to:
- First to get the list of family members as a "pure" family request
- Then make Biblio request in Published Services, with max. 100 documents per request to obtain the respective bibliographies gradually.


THanks
Sachin


EPO / OPS Support
Posts: 1298
Joined: Thu Feb 22, 2007 5:32 pm

Re: Error for documents having large number of family member

Post by EPO / OPS Support » Thu Feb 26, 2015 10:03 pm

Hi

General OPS user documentation, Json cross-domain info, WADL and XSD's are all available on our OPS website: http://www.epo.org/searching/free/ops/d ... ation.html

API console is here: https://developers.epo.org/?

But maybe some of our users who read this thread will also be kind enough to post their own solution, code here.

Regards,
OPS support


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