EPO - Discussion forums

Hi,

a question for the team working on INPADOC family data:

Is there a fixed way/rule/formula to (re-)create the INPADOC ID from the family member document identifiers alone or is there some independent extra element that cannot be determined from the documents themselves?

I.e. construct the INPADOC ID if it is not known?

If there is a fixed way, is it documented somewhere?

Best regards,
Ville

Hi,

Business rules for creating extended patent family are very complex. You can find very basic rules related to extended patent family also called Inpadoc patent family on our website, just put Inpadoc patent family into the search field on our home page.

There is not only one rule, the engine that calculates those families on the weekly basis is very complex and we are still working on it because combining patent publications according to their technical content is much more difficult then building simple family where all priority data has to be the same and we basically only combine different equvivalent publications.

Please note that Inpadoc family is one of the most frequently changed information we have, teoretically such family can get changed (new publications added or completly new familes formed from old publications, but with the new ID) practically every week.

Regards,
OPS support

Dear OPS support,

thank you for your reply.

Please allow me to add some follow-up question (or background for my original question):

As I understood the documentation, OPS returns a list of documents based on the extended INPADOC family, but does not disclose an extended-family-specific ID.

Some other commercial patent databases include an "INPADOC ID" in their output. The lack of this ID in OPS output (or did I miss it somewhere?) makes combined analysis and alignment of data from different database sources sometimes difficult.

But do I interpret your response correctly if I say that you treat extended-family-specific IDs as internal (and somewhat dynamic, at least for families with ongoing filing activity) and do not disclose them externally (i.e. to users via OPS queries)?

Best regards,
Ville

Dear Ville,

The INPADOC extended patent families made available through the OPS service are being re-calculated every week – by going through the complete collection every time.

OPS does not support a family-id for the INPADOC extended family for that very reason – the family-id would be as volatile as the INPADOC extended family itself.

We maintain a family-id for internal purposes ourselves but only for the sake of being able to make one family unique from another for the duration of the re-calculation process.

Kind regards,

OPS support