This space is made available to users of Open Patent Services (OPS) web-service and now also to users of EPO’s bulk data subscription products such as 14. EPO worldwide bibliographic database (DOCDB), 14.11 EPO worldwide legal status database (INPADOC), 14.12 EP full text data, 14.1 EP bibliographic data (EBD)and more.
Users can ask each other questions, exchange experiences and solutions, post ideas. The moderator will use this space to announce changes or other relevant information.
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Chris Every
- Posts: 23
- Joined: Mon Jun 24, 2013 10:21 am
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by Chris Every » Mon Sep 09, 2013 4:41 pm
Hi there,
we have noticed that the web service behaves differently than used to do. The test we wrote worked with version 3.0 in June 2012.
We do the following request
http://ops.epo.org/3.1/rest-services/family/publication/docdb/WO.9944063.*/legal
In the past we received an error when performing this request. That error was made up as follows
code 413
message CLIENT.AmbiguousRequest
Now we get one response with a list of patent family members. But those patent family members belong to different patent families. We can see this, as not all have the same patent family id.
The request above leads to 56 family members.
- Family ID 22129137 appears 28 times
- Family ID 26757494 appears 13 times
- Family ID 26803238 appears 11 times
- Family ID 26757495 appears 4 times
We do have code that handled the ambiguous error, now those tests fail and the application behaves differently. Is this intended behaviour on your side or probably an error?
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EPO / OPS Support
- Posts: 1298
- Joined: Thu Feb 22, 2007 5:32 pm
Post
by EPO / OPS Support » Tue Sep 10, 2013 12:52 pm
Dear user,
Since you are looking up WO number you should not get any ambiguous requests anyway (same goes for EP, where all publication stages keep same publication number and just the kind code will change).
Legal services is all about extended patent family (Inpadoc family) and not simple Docdb family (Espacenet calls it Espacenet family). This is the reason why your result list shows you family ID's from different and sometimes the same simple patent families.
For rules on extended family versus simple family see:
http://www.epo.org/searching/essentials ... ilies.html
Kind regards,
OPS support
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Chris Every
- Posts: 23
- Joined: Mon Jun 24, 2013 10:21 am
Post
by Chris Every » Tue Sep 10, 2013 3:00 pm
Thank you for your reply.
We have changed our tests to use the request
http://ops.epo.org/3.1/rest-services/legal/publication/docdb/JP.S5582191.*
This provokes the error we want to test.