Ruby Gem EPO-OPS released

The research group Competitive Intelligence at the Big Data Center of the Fraunhofer Institute for International Management and Knowledge Economy has released their latest ruby gem epo-ops to provide an easy to use interface to the European Patent Office’s Open Patent Sevices API through Ruby.

The European Patent OfficeExternal link (EPO) maintains one of the largest bodies of patent information worldwide. The EPO also provides an API called Open Patent ServicesExternal link (OPS) in XML. Usage of the OPS API is free of charge up to 2.5 GB per week via a free OPS account and 64€ per GB above this threshold, making a significant amount of data available for patent-related projects.

To improve the rather unwieldy XML API, the Competitive Intelligence research group at the Big Data Center of the Fraunhofer Institute fro International Management and Knowledge Economy released an open source ruby gemExternal link on github. Developed to assist the research group's own projects, the new eps-ops ruby gemExternal link is made up of useful wrapper classes to access the various functions provided by the original OPS API. In addition, the new gem includes plenty of workarounds coping with usage limitations of EPO's own API and to reduce complexity of accessing the EPO data.

For further information, please refer to the Competitive Intelligence research groupExternal link's own websiteExternal link. To access the of the new ruby gem directly, please find it on githubExternal link. The team welcomes any feedback and is grateful for suggestion for further improvement.

News from: 15.05.2016 21:47