 | Level: Intermediate Uche Ogbuji (uche@ogbuji.net), Principal Consultant, Fourthought, Inc.
07 Apr 2004 The major patent organizations all have the dual goal of making electronic patent filing easy and making such filings compatible from one office to another. XML is the leading technology behind these efforts and a great deal of thought and work has gone into XML formats for patent filing. In this column, Uche Ogbuji examines the background of XML patent e-filing and chats with patent expert Carl Oppedahl about the practicalities of XML filings. Share your thoughts on this article with the author and other readers in the accompanying discussion forum.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has long tried to make electronic filings practical. This is not surprising for a bureau whose very charter is to work with a clientele that focuses on the future. Furthermore the large patent offices process an extreme volume of data and need all the help they can get in keeping that data flow clean. From 1998 through 2000 the USPTO developed SGML DTDs for patent documents; in 2000 the bureau turned its attention to XML, initiating a process to develop XML DTDs by 2002. This work expanded to include trademark-related documents.
The USPTO is not alone in this endeavor. The two other large patent offices are the European Patent Office (EPO) and the Japan Patent Office (JPO). The latter was pioneering electronic filings as far back as 1990. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) acts among other things as an international arbiter for cooperation of patent offices, and it is working to standardize data interchange related to patent filing and processing. The WIPO standard is called the Electronic Patent Cooperation Treaty (E-PCT) or Annex F. It includes a set of XML DTDs that are separate from but similar to those developed by the large patent offices. In this article, I briefly discuss the WIPO XML format developed for standard electronic patent filings and interview an expert on XML-related patent filings.
The E-PCT DTD
After chasing down some dead ends to actual XML DTDs on the WIPO Web site, I found a cache of a working draft of the E-PCT DTD for patent application bodies from June, 2001 on the OASIS Cover Pages (see Resources). This schema is clearly designed by people who understand XML and who understand information architecture. It's certainly clear and approachable for anyone who's familiar with XML, even if not so with patent filings.
The main annoyances I find in the DTD are some rather unnecessary abbreviations. Most of the elements relate to prose content, following conventions familiar from XHTML and Docbook (though not always named as in those other standards). The model for tables is based on the well-known CALS standard, which includes well thought out content models for such items as personal and organization names, addresses, bibliographical citations, and patent cross-referencing. It includes the MathML DTD for handling formulae (chemical and mathematical formulae can also be included as specially typed images), and provides for biological data references. Metadata elements provide patent-specific metadata, but most of the legal details relating to a filing appear to be the preserve of other DTDs.
Is patent e-filing interoperable yet?
The e-filing approach supported by the USPTO involves using an application called PASAT to author a patent application, and another application called ePave for submission and other tasks. Dissatisfaction with PASAT is understood as one reason why e-filing hasn't taken off, but since its output is just XML with a published DTD, one should be able to use any suitable tool for authoring; this capability is called cross-platform filing. One such candidate tool, named PatXML, comes from the EPO. Another is PCT-SAFE Editor (PSE), a tool from WIPO for E-PCT filing. Both of these tools support export to the USPTO XML filing formats. An eventual goal of the Annex-F efforts is to make it possible for any filer to choose any preferred authoring tool, whether developed by a patent office or a commercial vendor, and be able to electronically file the resulting application with any of the major offices. The use of XML across all of these systems is expected to accelerate this process of integration.
Talking to Carl Oppedahl
The law firm of Oppedahl & Larson LLP offers patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, and other intellectual property services. They pride themselves on keeping abreast of the technology curve and in fact established an Internet presence early enough to have secured the domain name "patents.com". They are also among the early adopters of XML-based e-filing procedures and have published some useful articles that provide guidance on the use of the systems. These articles offer interesting lessons about general issues of interoperability of XML-driven systems.
I interviewed Carl Oppedahl, Partner at Oppedahl & Larson LLP, about his practical experience with cross-platform filing, knowing from his articles that he is knowledgeable in technical matters (including XML), as well as legal issues.
Uche Ogbuji: What are some of the complaints that practitioners have against PASAT, and why are PatXML and PCT-SAFE preferred by some users?
Carl Oppedahl: PASAT was developed many years ago and turns out to be unstable -- it sometimes crashes without explanation, losing the work that has been done. Other authoring tools that were developed more recently, such as PatXML and PCT-SAFE Editor, are much more stable.
Another difference that may be important for some users is that PCT-SAFE Editor is formally an XML editor with a user interface that one would expect for a tagging (HTML or SGML or XML) type of editor. With PCT-SAFE Editor, the file being created and edited, perhaps over a span of several days, is an XML file.
PASAT and PatXML are perhaps better characterized as XML "authoring tools". Each of these programs creates a file that is in some proprietary format that is not XML. As a user, you can click on a button to "export XML" at which time the program creates a new file that is an XML file.
Thus for some users -- for example users who were already familiar with HTML coding before they began trying to e-file patent applications -- the PCT-SAFE Editor may offer a more familiar user interface.
UO: Have you used any e-filing tools that do not use XML for the application body format? If so, does the use of XML affect the user experience in any significant way?
CO: Yes. The designers of the process for filing a PCT (international) patent application chose to allow users to file in either XML or in a PDF format. Of course there are advantages and disadvantages to this decision. On the one hand, by allowing PDF filings, the PCT patent office risks losing out on the many benefits of tagged computer-readable data. On the other hand, by allowing PDF filings the patent office may succeed in convincing more filers to file electronically rather than on paper.
UO: Have you ever had occasion to read the raw XML body of a patent application? If so, was this ability useful? If not, do you find useful the fact that you are able to read the raw data if the need ever arises?
CO: The great majority of patent e-filers have never looked at the raw XML code of their patent applications. In a well-designed and well-implemented system, of course, it might often turn out that most users would be shielded from having to look at the raw XML code and would be able to accomplish all of their goals without ever having to look at it. By way of analogy many people drive cars without ever actually lifting the hood and looking at the engine.
My patent law firm has chosen to try very hard to do cross-platform filings -- authoring with a tool from one patent office and filing the application with a different one. Because this cross-platform approach was (until now) relatively untested and bumped into a few stumbling blocks, we found that we did need to open up XML files using Notepad. Using Notepad we made such changes as turned out to be necessary to get the cross-platform filings to work.
UO: Have you ever processed, viewed, or handled XML documents for e-filing with any tools that are not specialized for patent filings (meaning, general XML or text tools).
CO: We have not really pursued [using generalized XML editors], although we keep thinking it would be a good idea to try it.
As mentioned above, we have quite often found ourselves using Notepad to at least view, and in some instances to edit, the XML code to overcome various cross-platform compatibility challenges.
UO: Have you ever looked at the EPO and PCT XML formats? Are these very different from each other and from the USPTO format? Did you find any one format more clear or readable?
CO: As it turns out, many years of work by EPO, WIPO (PCT), USPTO, and JPO (Japan) patent offices have been invested to develop a common DTD and other common standards (called Annex F) for e-filing of patent applications. This effort is intended to lead to a long-run situation in which a single XML format will work for e-filing in USPTO, EPO, and PCT situations.
Our patent firm was the first to achieve such cross-platform filings, and to get such filings to succeed we had to use Notepad to open XML files and adjust the syntax of references to external files such as embedded images. Other than these fairly minor edits, we found the XML formats from the various patent offices to be identical and thus equally clear and easy to read.
UO: Would you be willing to use commercial tools that take advantage of XML formats for more seamless cross-platform support?
CO: I would like very much to explore the possible use of a standard, widely-used, known-stable XML editor to author patent applications, using the Annex F DTD.
Keep in mind, of course, that the patent e-filing process has a first step of doing XML authoring, and a second step of presenting the XML file to a submission engine which receives the XML file at the patent office and grants an official filing receipt with a patent application serial number. While I can imagine drawing upon a commercial XML tool for the first step, I doubt there is any way I would be able to change anything about how the second step is carried out.
UO: Would you prefer to stick to the tools provided by the offices, expecting that they will become more cross-platform over time?
CO: In the particular area of patent e-filing, one issue that arises is that the filer may have image files (for the patent figures) that originated in any of a wide range of drawing tools (such as Visio, Powerpoint) and that may have been received from an inventor client in any of a wide range of formats (such as PDF, Microsoft Word, JPG, GIF, TIF). As it happens, the patent offices have agreed upon a fairly tightly constrained set of permitted image formats and sizes for embedding into the XML application body. Thus for the filer, there is a need to be able to accept random image files and somehow convert them into acceptable formats and to resize them to acceptable sizes.
To this end, some of the XML authoring tools provided by patent offices attempt to streamline the image format conversion and attachment (embedding) process. To the extent that these tools achieve this streamlining, they are a better choice (especially for those who are new to XML) than commercial and off-the-shelf XML editors.
UO: In your opinion, how long will it be before truly cross-platform patent filing tools are available? Do you think the adoption of XML has accelerated this process?
CO: Within the patent offices there are always budget limitations and staffing constraints that make it difficult to attack all goals at once. The USPTO's budget is determined by Congress and is subject to uncertainty at the present time. Right now the US Patent Office, for example, is providing some limited and informal support for cross-platform issues, but I would be delighted if eventually it could devote more resources to such issues.
There is no doubt that XML is the only reason that our patent firm has succeeded with our first few cross-platform patent filings. Without XML it would be out of the question. Most importantly, the people from various patent offices who have spent man-years developing the Annex F DTD for patent filings have brought us to the stage where the first few cross-platform filings have worked. Those man-years of effort toward a common DTD are beginning to bear fruit for users.
Wrap-up
It is gratifying to see XML fulfil some of its promise in so many specialized fields (I looked at the state of things in the financial services sector in my last article and educational content management before that). It is also sobering to have the lesson repeated that agreeing on a DTD is but the first step. Tools for processing (in this case filing and following up on an application) have to be developed to provide an interoperable framework for communicating the XML format. Thanks to a lot of hard work on XML applications and the pioneering efforts of a few patent filing experts, worldwide electronic filing and processing of patent applications might very soon be commonplace.
Resources
- Participate in the discussion forum.
- Read the WIPO article "Filing and Processing Patent Data Using XML - A World Standard," which includes background on the international standardization of XML filings as well as a description of the technical models on which the XML is based. Unfortunately, the many purported links to actual XML DTDs lead to a "Server Error" dead end at the time of writing, although older draft DTDs are cached at the Cover Pages.
- Explore the USPTO Electronic Filing System, the main resource for e-filing for US patents and trademarks.
- Visit epoline, the home page for EPO electronic patent filing, and PatXML, the tool provided by the EPO for XML-based filing.
- For practical details on using using the various XML-based e-filing systems, see "Using the PCT-SAFE XML editor with ePave to file a US patent application, "Comparison of USPTO and PCT e-filing systems," and "Cross-platform e-filings -- progress," all by Carl Oppedahl.
- Visit the patents.com Intellectual Property Law Web Server and browse the body of free and in-depth articles on IP law provided by Oppedahl & Larson LLP.
- Check out the ever useful Cover Pages, which include resources on the WIPO and USPTO formats for XML-based electronic filings. These pages include useful caches of relevant XML DTDs (you might need to right-click and save to view the DTD file).
- Learn more about the CALS standard.
- Find more XML resources on the developerWorks XML zone, including previous installments of
the Thinking XML column. If you have comments on this article, please post them on the Thinking XML forum.
- Browse for books on these and other technical topics.
- Find out how you can become an IBM Certified Developer in XML and related technologies.
About the author | 
| | Uche Ogbuji is a consultant and co-founder of Fourthought Inc., a software vendor and consultancy specializing in XML solutions for enterprise knowledge management. Fourthought develops 4Suite, an open source platform for XML, RDF, and knowledge-management applications. Mr. Ogbuji is also a lead developer of the Versa RDF query language. He is a computer engineer and writer born in Nigeria, living and working in Boulder, Colorado, USA. You can contact Mr. Ogbuji at uche@ogbuji.net. |
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