This European Patent Office Linked open EP data Service publishes information about European patent applications using a technique known as Linked Data.

Using linked data, all objects of interest are assigned a Web address so that data about that object can be retrieved over the web. For example, clicking on the following link:

will retrieve data about the European patent application with application number 99203729. Clicking on that link in a browser retrieves the data and presents it as a web page. The data can also be retrieved in other formats more suitable for processing by computer applications such as json, Resource Description Framework (RDF), text or XML.

The technique being used to represent this data is known as Linked Data because data items describing one object are linked to data items describing related objects. Because these links are represented by Web addresses, data in one system published by one provider can be linked to data in another published by another provider.

As well as data about individual items, information about lists of items can also be retrieved. Clicking on the link:

will retrieve information about the first 10 patent applications to the EPO stored in this system.. Links can also be created to return more results, include extra property values and to sort the results. For example, this link:

will retrieve data about patent publications published by the European Patent Office in January 2017, sort them by publication date and select the first 50. The English language title of the invention is included in the data returned. The service has to do quite a lot of work to execute this request, so please be patient as it may take a little while for the results to come back.

Thus this service supports a powerful Web interface that can be used by developers to query patent data and retrieve it in a format of their choice. This interface conforms to the Linked Data API Specification. This specification was a collaborative development by several organisations to define the specification of a configurable tool for creating Web APIs to linked data. See the specification for more information about its capabilities.

Developers can also query the data using Linked Data's query language, SPARQL. Queries can be entered into a web form and submitted, or can be sent by a program directly to the database at /linked-data/query.

As well as information about patents, this system contains a Linked Data representation of the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) scheme. Follow this link to see the top of the classification hierarchy.