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Is "famn-id" persistent in EPO OPS?

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2016 12:15 pm
by nisseknudsen
Dear OPS Forum members,

I am working with the extraction of patent families for certain application names.
I understood, that we can not retrieve a list of all patent families for an application name, but only for a publication ID. That is ok for now, but I would like to know, if the "famn-id" (aka simple family identifier) is a persistent number and does not change over time.
In one of the forum entries I read something about recalculating these numbers every week, but it might have been related to another service.

Can someone comment if this simple family identifier is a reliable ID, which does not change over time?

Thanks a lot,
Nisse

Re: Is "famn-id" persistent in EPO OPS?

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2016 10:16 pm
by EPO / OPS Support
Hi,

Simple patent family is quite stable, there can only be a changes if the family is formed by mistake and has to be a amanded at some point.

The comment about re-calculating is probably related to OPS Family service which gives INPADOC patent family aka extended family information and can theoretically change with every loading of the new documents and is updated/re-calculated once per week, over the weekend.

To read more about family identifier or even DocID you can find our DOCDB user documentation available on our website, in Manuals section or under DOCDB raw data product. DOCDB is not exactly the source of data in Espacenet/OPS but this particular peace of information does indeed originates from the DOCDB

Regards,
OPS support