Open Data APIs at the US Patent and Trademark Office

  • henok_mikre

    Henok Mikre

Last week, the third revision of the USPTO Open Data Portal was released. The biggest feature in this release was the Unified Events API, which aggregates all of the events across the USPTO and provides a publicly-accessible endpoint. The UE API detail page has a demo section with links to the API explorer.

The release also included an API Catalog and a refined Bulk Data section that leverages the public Bulk Data Storage System (BDSS) API. The API Catalog features the new BDSS and Unified Events APIs. It also features a couple of other APIs that have been publicly available for some time.

The BDSS products were previously available as static content at https://data.uspto.gov, which has since been redirected to the bulk data section on the Open Data Portal. The new section on the portal is built with a Drupal module that traverses the API. The static listing is still available with links to each product. However, the bulk data section on the Open Data Portal is the best method to discover bulk data products. It provides hierarchical listing pages as drill-down by IP type, product type and product category. There is also a filter table on each product detail page to sort and filter products by date and type. Once developers identify a BDSS product they would like to explore, they can download the file and use the bulk-data-tools to dig in. The UI for all of the various components is based on the excellent USPTO design library.

Let's work together to deliver a success story.