USPatents

Publishing and Interlinking the USPTO Patent Data

Abstract:

A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted to an inventor by a sovereign state for a solution, be it a product or a process, for a solution to a particular technological problem. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is part of the US department of Commerce that provides patents to businesses and inventors for their inventions in addition to registration of products and intellectual property identification. Each year, the USPTO grants over 150,000 patents to individuals and companies all over the world. As of December 2011, 8,743,423 patents have been issued and 16,020,302 applications have been received. The USPTO patents are accepted in electronic form and are filed as PDF documents. However, the indexing is not perfect and it is cumbersome to search through the PDF documents. Additionally, Google has also made all the patents available for download in XML format, albeit only from the years 2002 to 2015. Thus, we converted this bulk of data (spanning 13 years) from XML to RDF to conform to the Linked Data principles.