Linked open EP data
This Linked Open EP Data service uses an OWL ontology to describe a conceptual model of patents and the structure of the patent data. OWL is a formal ontology language standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
The prefix normally used for terms in the patent ontology is
patent:. The ontology namespace is
http://data.epo.org/linked-data/def/patent/. The URLs identifying all terms in the ontology dereference and are also described in the patent ontology reference page.
An overview of the major classes in the patent ontology is given in the following diagram:
The central concepts in the ontology are the classes patent:Application and patent:Publication. An application is an application for a patent or other intellectual property right. The property patent:publication relates an application to the documents published as part of the formal process of processing the application.
Both applications and publications are related to a patent authority, Applications are related to the authority to which the application was made by the property patent:applicationAuthority. Publications are related to the authority which published the document by the property patent:publicationAuthority. Patent authorities may be national patent authorities such as the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office or an international authority such as the European Patent Office.
An application may be a member of a patent:SimpleFamily. A simple family is a family of related applications such as applications concerning the same invention in different countries. The properties patent:familyMember and patent:familyMemberOf relate a family to its members and an application to its simple family respectively.
To aid finding them, applications are classified using the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) classification scheme. (As described below, publications are also classified by the older International Patent Classification (IPC) scheme which CPC extends.)
The properties patent:classificationCPCInventive and patent:classificationCPCAdditional relate an application to its CPC classifications. The 'inventive' properties indicate the core classifications of the invention. The 'additional' properties represent additional classifications to which the invention may be related.
Publications have properties patent:inventorVC, patent:applicantVC and patent:agentVC which relate it to VCards (virtual business cards) for each of the invention's inventors, the applicant and each of the agents of the applicant respectively.
Publications are related to patent publications that they cite by the property patent:citesPatentPublication. A publication may also cite non patent literature such as scientific publications. Such citations are represented by an instance of the class CitationNPL. The property citationNPL relates a publication to a citation of non patent literature.
Publications are classified using the International Patent Classification scheme (IPC). The properties ipc:classificationInventive and cpc:classificationAdditional relate an application to its IPC classifications. As with CPC, the 'inventive' properties indicate the core classifications of the invention and the 'additional' properties represent additional classifications to which the invention may be related.
Publications are also related to representations of the publication by the property representation. A Representation is a representation of the publication in some format such as HTML, XML or PDF.