Espacenet (formerly stylized as ''esp@cenet'') is a free

online In computer technology and telecommunications, online indicates a state of connectivity and offline indicates a disconnected state. In modern terminology, this usually refers to an Internet connection, but (especially when expressed "on line" o ...

service for searching patents and

patent application A patent application is a request pending at a patent office for the grant of a patent for an invention described in the patent specification and a set of one or more claims stated in a formal document, including necessary official forms and re ...

s. Espacenet was developed by the

European Patent Office The European Patent Office (EPO) is one of the two organs of the European Patent Organisation (EPOrg), the other being the Administrative Council. The EPO acts as executive body for the organisation

(EPO) together with the member states of the

European Patent Organisation The European Patent Organisation (sometimes abbreviated EPOrg in order to distinguish it from the European Patent Office, one of the two organs of the organisation) is a public international organisation created in 1977 by its contracting states t ...

. Most member states have an Espacenet service in their national

language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...

, and access to the EPO's worldwide

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...

, most of which is in English. In 2022, the Espacenet worldwide service claimed to have records on more than 140 million patent publications.

History

By launching Espacenet in 1998, the EPO is said to have "revolutionized public access to international patent information, releasing patent data from its paper prisons and changing forever how patents are disseminated, organized, searched, and retrieved." In 2004, i.e. in the early years of Espacenet, Nancy Lambert considered that, although free, Espacenet, like the

United States Patent and Trademark Office The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark registration authority for the United States. The USPTO's headquarters are in Alex ...

(USPTO) database of US patents, "still tend dto have primitive search engines and in some cases rather cumbersome mechanisms to download patents."Lambert, N. (2004).
Internet patent information in the 21st century: A comparison of Delphion, Micropatent, and QPAT
'', 2004 International Chemical Information Conference & Exhibition, Annecy, France, 17–20 October 2004, pp 1–2. She reported it as being deliberate, on the part of the USPTO and EPO, "who have said they do not wish to compete unfairly with commercial vendors". In 2009, Espacenet offered the so-called SmartSearch which allows a query to be composed using a subset of

Contextual Query Language Contextual Query Language (CQL), previously known as Common Query Language, is a formal language for representing queries to information retrieval systems such as search engines, bibliographic catalogs and museum collection information. Based on t ...

(CQL). In 2012, the EPO launched "Patent Translate", a free online automatic translation service for patents. Created in partnership with

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

, the translation engine was "specifically built to handle complex and technical patent vocabulary", using "millions of official, human-translated patent documents" to train the translation engine. It covers translations between English and 31 other languages. According to the ''

Patent Information News ''Patent Information News'' is a trilingual, quarterly magazine published by the Principal Directorate Patent Information of the European Patent Office (EPO), Vienna sub-office, Austria. History and profile ''Patent Information News'' was launch ...

magazine published by the EPO, a 2013 independent study compared Espacenet with DepatisNet, Freepatentsonline, Google Patent and the public search facility at the

USPTO The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark registration authority for the United States. The USPTO's headquarters are in Alexa ...

. In that study, Espacenet reportedly obtained the highest score for both data coverage and customer support, and the best overall aggregated score. In March 2016, Espacenet began offering

full-text search In text retrieval, full-text search refers to techniques for searching a single computer-stored document or a collection in a full-text database. Full-text search is distinguished from searches based on metadata or on parts of the original texts ...

through its collection of English, French and German patent documents.

References

External links

* {{official website, http://worldwide.espacenet.com/ Bibliographic databases in engineering European Patent Organisation Online databases Patent search services Technology websites

History

See also

References

External links