Some questions about "EP full-text search" web service

Here you can post your opinions, ask questions and share information regarding the following services:
European Publication Server (EPO's official publication platform), EP Bulletin search and EP full-text search (Searching procedural data and the full text of EP A and B documents via the "Patent information services for experts" user interface).
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OEPM / Chencho
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Oct 17, 2019 4:23 pm

Some questions about "EP full-text search" web service

Post by OEPM / Chencho » Mon Oct 21, 2019 11:00 am

Due to a problem we have had in the past with the European patents loading process that uses the files with the specification the EBD (https://www.epo.org/searching-for-paten ... html#tab-1), we are trying to use the "EP full-text search" web service to retrieve that information and load it into our systems. To do that, we do a request to the web service; then, we select all the patents publications we want to upload to our system and finally, we download the data in XML format.

We have been finding some problems with this process. For example, we have to change the <ep-patent-document> tag to the <ep-bulletin> one. We have also had to keep only the <SDOBI> tag and its child elements, discarding the rest of the downloaded tags.

We currently have a new problem. The “file” attribute of the <ep-bulletin> tag, should have the format of the request number and control digit, but we are obtaining it as follows:

<ep-patent-document id = "EP10791303B1" file = "EP10791303NWB1.xml" lang = "en" country = "EP" doc-number = "2506626" kind = "B1" date-publ = "20160629" status = " n "dtd-version =" ep-patent-document-v1-5 ">

Following these problems, we would like to know two things:

1. Is there any way of downloading a list of publications in the exact EBD format? As far as we know, it is not possible to retrieve the exact EBD format using the EPOs Webservices.
2. Has anyone had the need to upload the patents with EBD format files and has done that using the "EP full-text search" web service?

Thanks in advance


EPO / EPAL Team
Posts: 141
Joined: Mon Dec 22, 2014 8:30 am

Re: Some questions about "EP full-text search" web service

Post by EPO / EPAL Team » Wed Oct 23, 2019 7:36 am

Question 1: could you please make a test with "EP Bulletin search" (same user interface as "EP full-text search") ?
"EP Bulletin search" is based on EBD and it enables you to download data (biblio. and procedural (legal status information) in XML format.
Your query would be for example
PUNR = 3554208 3554206 3554207 ... (using EP publication numbers)
or
APNR = 16923135 16924030 18166862 ... (using EP application numbers)

Question 2: we are not aware of such attempt (the 2 products being different in their nature, i.e. "EP Bulletin search" includes biblio. and procedural/legal status information that may change over the time for a given application whereas "EP full-text search" includes snapshots of what is published)

Patrick Le Gonidec


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