Technologiefrüherkennungsplattform

PATSTAT EP Register documentation

The EPO’s Technology Intelligence Platform (TIP) is the new flagship tool for retrieving, processing and visualising patent data. TIP users benefit from access to the EPO’s data collection in a powerful and flexible environment based on Jupyter Labs, a widely used platform for data analysis.

To support TIP’s launch, the EPO has developed comprehensive training material and documentation. An Intro to TIP course was published alongside the platform’s launch, and users can access extensive documentation in a dedicated training folder available within their TIP workspace. Maintained by the EPO, the folder contains the latest documentation in the form of notebooks that can be opened in TIP. With this approach, users have a self-contained environment where the documentation and training material are in the same space as the platform itself. 

One data source in TIP is PATSTAT, a global repository of bibliographical and legal patent data accessible via a dedicated SQL-based interface. TIP users can continue querying the PATSTAT database with the same SQL queries used in the legacy PATSTAT online client. In addition, users can harness the power of TIP’s Object Relational Mapping queries. The Intro to the TIP course and the built-in documentation provide guidance on both approaches.

Traditionally, users relied on the PATSTAT Data Catalogues as their primary source of database documentation. While these remain the authoritative reference for logical models, tables and fields, the EPO now offers a comprehensive set of notebooks documenting all PATSTAT tables and fields. These notebooks are available in an official Github repository and within the training folder in your PATSTAT workspace.

The notebooks are arranged by database table, with each notebook covering a single table within the two database schemas, PATSTAT Global and PATSTAT EP Register. They include explanations of all fields, as well as example queries demonstrating data retrieval in TIP. Since these databases are relational databases, many tables are designed for combined use, and the notebooks  illustrate how to effectively combine tables.

These notebooks do not replace the official PATSTAT documentation, but provide a practical demonstration of all the tables and fields in a format that TIP users can run, explore and modify.

Keywords: data processing, visualisation, patent data analysis, PATSTAT