Workbook Title - FIZ Karlsruhe

During a project which lasted for several years the data from the INPADOC Patent Family Service
(PFS) and those from the EPO‟s DOCDB backfile were merged. Besides, cited references from
the so-called REFI database were included. The EPO internally stores the entire database under
the name of DOCDB. Since the end of April 2007, only one data format is delivered: DOCDB
XML according to WIPO ST.36.
Patent authorities and patent offices deliver the data to the EPO on electronic storage media or in
print. The EPO tries to edit and standardize these data, but the reached quality level is limited by
the nature of received input. About 1 million data corrections are performed by the EPO each year.
For further improvement of the database, data undergo another quality check at FIZ Karlsruhe and
are corrected by the FIZ editorial team.
In INPADOCDB the documents consist of all publication series/documents of a patent application
from one country. The documents can be grouped to families by priority. This allows the user to
find out in which country a patent application was filed and where the patent was granted.
In the INPAFAMDB file database records consist of all publications for one patent family. Search
indexes are family-based, which means that for a record terms from the complete family are
considered in the indexes.
The two databases therefore offer excellent possibilities for performing patent SDIs in order to
monitor the import and export strategies of competitors or to find out in which countries the
invention is not protected and thus freely usable.
At present, cited references for 13 countries are available. They comprise cited references from the
search report, applicants‟ citations and citations from other sources. This information is very
useful in order to find related applications or competitors.
The legal status part of the database provides information as to whether a patent is still valid or has
expired. This makes it easier to find inventions for which the patent has been discontinued or
which are no longer valid because the annual fee has not been paid. All legal status changes,
before and after the granting of the patent, are listed in chronological order and can be searched
for in detail on STN. At present there are more than 2,600 legal status codes. About 1,300 codes
were categorized in STN to simplify legal status searching.
INPADOCDB/INPAFAMDB data start with the patent number US 1 from 1836 and currently
comprise 63 million publications.
Bibliographic coverage for countries with more than 500,000 records
INPADOCDB bei STN International | Page 6