esp@cenet

The esp@cenet service offers the general public free access to worldwide patent information via the internet. It has the following main aims:

• to offer basic patent information to individuals, small and medium-sized enterprises, students etc
• to increase awareness and use of patent information at the national and European levels
• to support innovation, reduce wastage in the innovation cycle
• to supplement existing channels for the dissemination of patent information

Access to esp@cenet is through servers hosted at each office of the member states of the organisation. The architecture allows the customisation of the user interface into one or more languages used in each country. Provision of online help and extended offline support is the responsibility of each member state.

Access esp@cenet in your language .

The forms-based interface offers simple searches for non-specialists in the most common bibliographic information fields, including the title of the document in its original language.

Responsibility for the initial development and subsequent maintenance of the esp@cenet applications running on these server remains with the Office. The Office provided a standard turnkey solution, comprising hardware and software to each participating office.

In addition, to provide the access point for esp@cenet users, each server hosts a searchable collection of at least the last 24 months of published patent documents with the corresponding documents in facsimile image form, if available. The data is extracted on a regular basis from the Office's systems and uploaded onto the National Office's servers. This mechanism helps to guarantee the standardisation of data and formats.

To supplement the national data collections, each esp@cenet server offers access to a worldwide database (EPODOC), called esp@cenet level II, The worldwide database is based on the PCT minimum documentation, but its coverage has been expanded by the EPO to go beyond this minimum. Data from additional countries and more extended time periods are available. Supplementary information has been added by examiners, such as ECLA classes, references to cited documents and non-patent literature. The data formats, the basic search interface, and the searchable fields in the worldwide database are the same as those used for the national collections. Thus they form a homogeneous system - except that the data must be searched in English. The searchable fields include not just the title, but also the abstracts of the documents.

In addition to basic bibliographic data, the full text of documents in both character-coded from and as facsimiles images can be displayed if the data is available. The images are sourced from the BNS collection, so that they make use of the databases originally built for the Office's own examiners.

The esp@cenet service was designed to offer access to the technical content of patent applications. The basic document in esp@cenet will be a patent application, and, if available, the corresponding patent specification will also be made available. Legal status information is obtained from the INPADOC collection accessible from esp@cenet.

Future developments of esp@cenet will be based on user input, and availability and maintainability criteria. In the mid-term developments will not be constrained by artificial limitations, but will allow users to make enhanced use of the esp@cenet service up to the technical limits of the system. Integrated user support measures such as help files and e-learning will be developed in parallel to underpin the technical developments.