Bulk Download Changes

• Line Breaks retained in text data:
  • Claims: all text from 2001 and later will have the line breaks in the text
  • Brief Summary Text:
    * Data from 2020 and later will have the line breaks retained in the text.
    * Line breaks for older data will get included when the first opportunity to reparse older data arises.
  • Detailed Description Text:
    * Data from 2020 and later will have the line breaks retained in the text.
    * Line breaks for older data will get included when the first opportunity to reparse older data arises.
  • Draw Description Text: Line breaks are not included at this time.
• Location ID added to patent_assignee and patent_inventor
  • Previously to identify the location of a patent by the way of the assignee, patent_assignee needed to be joined with location_assignee and then with the location table. A similar join was needed for the patent inventor. To reduce the complexity, patent_assignee and patent_inventor tables will carry an additional field: location_id. This field will map to the id field from the location table. This makes the data in location_assignee and location_inventor redundant. Future releases will not carry these two tables.
• Read In Scripts:
  • Example Python & R scripts that demonstrate reading each bulk download file will be available here: Read In Scripts This is a work in progress and will be updated over time.
• Planned changes after 2020.03.22v1 release (Documentation and details will be added with the release)
  • Claims:
    • Remove duplicates in some of the claims yearly files where the first set of records (about 300K) are duplicated.
    • Remove NULL text data in some of the claims files.
    • Recode NUM field and add documentation.
    • Recode Exemplary field (replacing TRUE/FALSE with 0/1)
    • Re-order header to be consistent with data dictionary
  • Brief Summary Text:
    • Break files into yearly files
  • Draw Description Text:
    • Break files into yearly files
    • Include line breaks in the text