The INNOVATE OPS API was developed during the redesign and new development of a Patent Monitoring System. Instead of the expensable and manual collecting of patents into a database before, this API enabled online searching and saving of patent data according to any definable profile. Although OPS doesn't offer complete information for every patent, at first it seemed to deliver enough information for doing the job the Patent Monitoring System standed for (e.g.: checking search profiles and inform about for new patents or patents changes).

Working with OPS however, we saw some crucial differences between searching in a database with full publication data and OPS:

• Until now, in OPS it's not possible to search for text not indexed as English.
  This means, that a document with only an other language than English cannot be found per CQL-search, e.g.:
  • "Datos auxiliares de profundidad" should deliver ES2645639
  • "Das Wärmepaneel" should deliver at least DE202018001836
  • "MATERIAU POLYCRISTALLIN ET SON PROCEDE D'OBTENTION" should deliver at least FR3066952
  • "Inrichting voor het lanceren van dummy's" should deliver NL1042680B1
  However, if a text was indexed wrong, you may get results, e.g.: the document EP1223398A1 you may find with "Erwärmen", since the german title was indexed as english.
• Single search results could have about 100 documents only.
• Some changes in documents couldn't be found, e.g. changes in a B-document, if the publicationdate of an A-document didn't change.
  • "pn:EP0000010 AND pd:19800109" should deliver EP0000010B1.
• Full text searches in descriptions are not possible, since only biblio data are searched.
• In OPS, there is no unique index for a single exchange-doc to search for.
• OPS only may have max. 10 terms within one query

INNOVATE (we) decided to work on reducing these limitations and the data preparation for easy analysis. Therefore:

• The EPO DOCDB download possibility was analyzed and prepared to use for an archive base. It was discarded by INNOVATE's customer.
• With that solution prepared, INNOVATE developed the saving of every query in a SOLR search engine. It delivers it's query results compatable with the OPS back-end.
  
• For data analysis we came across the solutions of Patent2Net (P2N). Unfortunately this system is a bit hard to use, especially for non programmers. Very good however, because of it's results. It inspired us to combine our and some of their possibilities.

In the actual development status of INNOVATE OPS Patentsearch we implemented solutions for most of the above mentioned crucial limitations to OPS on a Linux system. (Working with profiles, after cyclic updates, users may be advised to use the Solr archive for searches.):

More Information Patentsearch