About EP register

The European Patent Register is the place where the European Patent Office stores all the publicly available information it has on European patent applications in the various stages of the grant procedure.

Information includes all changes with timeline, documents and communications (EPO DATA ONLY)

All data is extracted from the EPO's EPASYS database - a database which contains all procedural data regarding European patent documents.
EPASYS data input is the responsibility of many EPO staff (examiners and formalities officers) with many thousands of transactions taking place per day.

Two versions are available offline
XML backfile (1978 to date) + 2 weekly updates (EBD Epo Bibliographic Data) only one table contains all info (like tls221) but only updates are added;
http://www.epo.org/searching/subscription/raw/product-14-1.html
It should be noted that the EBD file is not a cumulative record of all the changes which may have been made to a file (for this users should refer to the Register of European Patents (see above) - it is a ‘snap shot’ of only those changes which
occurred in a particular publication week. In addition there is a clear distinction between A and B publications (separate files) since these are separate documents for publication purposes - therefore, the B file is not an update of the A file;
it is a file in its own right (extracted from EPASYS) - although, of course, much of the data may be the same in both files.


CSV (EP register for patstat) patstat compatible (link to appln_id) relational tables (twice a year) a set of over 40 tables where data are split by type of info
http://www.epo.org/searching/subscription/raw/product-14-24-2.html


PRO AND CONS of the two versions

XML (EBD):
PRO: weekly update; easy to follow history of one application
CONS: no direct link to patstat

CSV:
PRO: easy link to patstat based DBs, info divided by type;
CONS: not timely updates; not easy to buildup full history of one application;