The CNIPA’s Patent Document Authority File contains information on the different kinds of publications of patents for inventions and utility models published by the China National Intellectual Property Administration since 1985 based on WIPO ST.37.
The primary purpose of the authority file generated by CNIPA is to allow other industrial property offices and other interested parties to assess the completeness of the available patent documentation. The technical description of the Authority File is as follows.
1. Information contained in the Authority File
Each record of the patent document in the CNIPA’s Authority File contains the following four parts.
1.1 Country code
According to WIPO Standard ST.3, the country code of the China National Intellectual Property Administration is CN.
1.2 Publication number
The publication number refers to the patent document identification number given by the CNIPA in accordance with legal procedures when the patent application is published and the patent authorization is announced.
The publication number in the Authority File will be faithful to the original publication.
1.3 Kind code of the patent document
The kind code of the patent document refers to the letter code specified by the CNIPA for identifying different types of patent documents, or a combination code of letters and numbers.
The kind code of the patent document in the Authority File is faithful to the original publication.
1.4 Date of publication
Date of publication refers to the date of publication of the patent document corresponding to the kind code of the patent document. The format of the public date is in the form of YYYYMMDD, in which YYYY is the year represented by 4 digits, MM is the month represented by 2 digits, and DD is the day represented by 2 digits.
2. The organization of Authority Files
The Authority File of the Chinese patent document is divided into two parts according to the invention and the utility model. Each part corresponds to a text file, and UTF-8 character code is used, in which the information of the invention and the utility model are respectively stored.
2.1 File Name
The file name of each Authority File contains patent type and data coverage, which are separated by spaces.
Patent type may be invention or utility model.
Data coverage is the starting and ending range of the document publication date contained in the Authority File. The starting time and the ending time are connected by the character “-”.
For example: " INVENTION 19850910-20190630 ". It indicates that the Authority File contains information on Chinese invention patent documents published from September 10, 1985 to June 30, 2019.
2.2 Internal structure
The internal structure of the Authority File is as follows.
Patent document records are separated by CRLF (carriage return and Line Feed);
The country code, publication number, kind code of the patent document and the publication date are separated by “,”;
Patent document records are sorted by publication number. When the patent document numbers are the same, they are sorted by kind code.
Figure 1 is an example.
Figure 1: Example of Authority File