fhg-imw / epo-ops

Ruby interface to the European Patent Office API (OPS)

epo-ops

Ruby interface to the EPO Open Patent Services (OPS).

Full documentation can be found here

Usage

Quickstart

Simply install this gem and start a ruby console.

$ gem install epo-ops
$ irb

and start querying the API

require 'epo_ops'

patent_application = EpoOps::PatentApplication.find("EP14731659")
patent_application.title  # "DEVICE AND METHOD FOR INTRODUCING FIBRES INTO AN EXTRUDER"
patent_application.classifications # ["B29C47/10", "B29C47/68", "B29C47/92", "B29C45/00", "B01D46/24"]
patent_application.applicants.first.name # "Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V."

Supported Ruby Versions

For supported versions see .travis.yml. We try to keep it updated to officially supported Ruby versions.

Advanced Usage

OAuth

EPO offers an anonymous developer access to their API with very little quota. To get extended quotas you can register an account at the EPO for OAuth

After your account has been approved configure your credentials

EpoOps.configure do |conf|
  conf.authentication = :oauth
  conf.consumer_key = "YOUR_KEY"
  conf.consumer_secret = "YOUR_SECRET"
end

The temporary access token is kept in memory for subsequent retrievals. To share this between several processes the token storage strategy may be changed as shown in epo/ops/token_store for redis.

Querying and searching patent applications

Currently this gem focuses mostly around patent applications. It is possible to search for specific applications by application number and to search for applications using a CQL search query

For example to find all applications in IPC Class A01 (and all subclasses) that were updated on 2016-01-01

query = EpoOps::SearchQueryBuilder.build("A01", Date.parse("2016-01-06"))
applications = EpoOps::PatentApplication.search(query)
applications.count #=> 66
applications.map {|application| puts application.application_nr } # print all application numbers
applications.map {|application| application.fetch} # fetch complete bibliographic data for each document

The Request will return a search result containing the number of all applications matching the search. By default the search will return 10 documents (max is 100). You can use start_rang and end_range of EpoOps::SearchQueryBuilder.build to page through all results

Note: EPO will always only return up to 2000 documents even if the search would return more

Search for all Patents on a given Date

To circumvent the restriction of max 2000 search results this gem offers a convenient method to search for all patents updated on a given date and/or a given IPC class

EpoOps::Register.search("A", Date.new(2016,2 ,3))
# or for all ipc classes
EpoOps::Register.search(nil, Date.new(2016,2 ,3))

You can now retrieve the bibliographic entries of all these:

patent_applications = EpoOps::Register.search(nil, Date.new(2016,2 ,3))
patent_applications.count == patent_applications.patents.count #=> true

Note: Both operations take a considerable amount of time. Also you may not want to develop and test with many of these requests, as they can quite quickly exceed your limits.

Further Reading

The EPO provides a developer playground, where you can test-drive the OPS-API. They also provide extensive documentation of the different endpoints and how to use them (see the 'Downloads' section).

Development

This gem is still an early version and it is far from covering the whole API. If you are interested to include different API endpoints than the register it should be easy to include those and we are happy to accept pull requests.

epo-ops's Issues

Ensure compatibility with new Epo OPS API version 3.2

As of Q2 2017 Epo is discontinuation version 3.1 of Epo OPS [1]. There should be no breaking changes for us but we should ensure the new version is used and functionality preserved

[1] http://forums.epo.org/open-patent-services-and-publication-server-web-service/topic5378.html