Office specific data elements

WIPO’s ST.36 Standard recommendation for the processing of patent information using XML includes a provision for so-called office-specific-data elements. These elements can be used to encapsulate details unique to a particular country in patent bibliographic data published for that country. ST.36 also provides alternative mechanisms for accomplishing the same thing, e.g. mixing office-specific elements with international common elements.

Let’s consider an example. United States patent no. 8260535 issued on 4 September 2012 to Bombardier Recreational Products Inc. of Valcourt, Québec, Canada for an invention of Mario Dagenais entitled "Load sensor for a vehicle electronic stability system". The ‘535 patent issued from United States patent application no. 11/864,265 which was filed on 28 September 2007.

As of this writing, an apparently corresponding Canadian patent application is pending, namely CA 2699332 which was published by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office as of 2 April 2009. The ‘332 application is a Canadian national counterpart of international application PCT/US2008/070129 which was filed on 16 July 2008 and claimed priority based upon the US ‘265 application. PCT/US2008/070129 was published on 2 April 2009 as WO2009/042276.

Consider this small extract from the <ca-bibliographic-data> element of the Canadian Intellectual Property Office’s XML publication for the ‘332 application. The <ca-bibliographic-data> element encapsulates the <publication-reference> element, which in turn encapsulates the <document-id> element. The <country>, <doc-number>, <kind> and <date> elements encapsulated by the <document-id> element identify this as Canadian patent application no. 2699332 published 2 April 2009, as aforesaid.

Now consider this corresponding small extract from the <us-bibliographic-data-grant> element of the USPTO’s XML publication for the ‘535 patent. Some structural similarities are evident: the <us-bibliographic-data-grant> element encapsulates the <publication-reference> element, which in turn encapsulates the <document-id> element. The <country>, <doc-number>, <kind> and <date> elements encapsulated by the <document-id> element identify this as United States patent no. 8260535 issued 4 September 2012, as aforesaid.

The foregoing are examples of international common elements.

Now consider this small extract from the <ca-office-specific-bib-data> element of the CIPO’s XML publication for the ‘332 application. Among other things, this encapsulates the <ca-license-for-sale> element.  This is a uniquely Canadian feature whereby a patentee may request that a patent be flagged as available for license or sale when details of that patent are published in the CIPO’s weekly Canadian Patent Office Record. In this case the <ca-license-for-sale> element encapsulates the word "false", indicating that no such flag has been raised in respect of the ‘332 application—not surprising since the ‘332 application has not issued as a Canadian patent as of this writing.

Finally, consider this small extract from the concluding portion of the <us-bibliographic-data-grant> element of the USPTO’s XML publication for the ‘535 patent. Here we have some uniquely American features identifying the primary examiner (Khoi Tran), the USPTO art unit (3664: robotics and vehicle controls) and the assistant examiner (Bhavesh V. Amin) for the ‘535 patent.

We can thus see that the CIPO has opted to implement ST.36 by assigning office-specific-data elements to encapsulate details unique to Canada, whereas the USPTO implements ST.36 by mixing office-specific elements with international common elements.