About number of claims in Patstat

A valuable piece of information contained in TLS212_pat_publn is the number of claims.

This info also can change with the publication status, following the examination procedure that may reduce their number.

Unfortunately this info is availabe only for EP and US published patents. Citing the Patstat data handbook:
"Data sources for number of claims: The number of claims for EPO and US publications are taken from special data feeds directly from EP and USPTO."

Number of EPO applications in Docdb families

I've been recently asked whether the number of epo applications would be a good proxy for docdb patent family. In reality it dipends from the average number of EPO applications in each of those families.
I expected the figure to be around 1 but I made a few calcs and, after removing a number of patent fmailies without any EPO (non PCT) application, I got a 1.0887 that is quite confirming the hypotesys.

Here the full counts of number of docdb family by number of EP applications.

N EP	N docdb fam
0	47930863
1	3002328
2	106275
3	15404
4	4537
5	1738
6	846
7	440
8	240
9	144
10	93
11	74
12	47
13	41
14	22
15	20
16	16
17	9
18	9
19	15
20	6
21	10
22	1
23	3
24	4
25	3
26	4
28	2
29	1
30	1
31	1
36	1
38	1
42	1
44	2
46	1
47	1
58	1
331	1
1650	1
3645	1
99668	1

IPCCAT - Categorization Assistant in the International Patent Classification

IPCCAT is a categorization assistance tool for the International Patent Classification system available at WIPO website. It is mainly designed to help to classify patents at IPC class, subclass or main group level.

This categorization tool was built on a technology developed by a group of researchers called the ISI Group at the University Center for Computer Science of the University of Geneva.

It was implemented and adapted by the company MetaRead in Geneva. 

link:

https://www3.wipo.int/ipccat/

Patents: oldies but goldies (?)

A quick enquiry on patstat data: we know it has a very wide geographic scope, but also timeline is quite long: 21 patetn offices have at least one patent date minor or equal to 1900.

Some case may be isolated, thus I added also the date of the first year where number of applications was greater than 10, so we see FI that soem countries (AT, BE, CA, CH, DE, ES, FR, GB, HU, NZ, SE and US) have a number of old patents in Patstat.
TW 1900 is obviously a data entry error (see original at this link) andd unexpected, SPAIN is the first application authority to overcome 10 patents, in 1826!

appln auth	first patent year	First year with 10 or more patents
AT	1885	1893
AU	1891	1907
BE	1848	1896
BR	1900	1926
CA	1875	1889
CH	1888	1888
DE	1866	1877
DK	1894	1902
ES	1826	1826
FR	1844	1861
GB	1782	1856
HU	1898	1899
IT	1886	1901
NL	1862	1912
NO	1893	1903
NZ	1894	1896
RO	1900	1924
SE	1854	1896
TN	1900	1945
TW	1900	1985
US	1790	1858