The EAPO delegation participated in the work of the Twentieth Session of the XML4IP Task Force of the Committee on WIPO Standards (CWS) on March 11-15, 2019, Seoul, Republic of Korea.

Representatives of national patent offices of Australia, Austria, United Kingdom, Canada, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, USA, the Republic of Korea, World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), European Patent Office (EPO), European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and others also took part in the event.

Annual meetings of the XML4IP Task Force are aimed at developing of WIPO XML (eXtensible Markup Language) standards for the presentation of information in the field of intellectual property.

The session was traditionally opened by exchange of information on the results of implementation of WIPO Standards. Representatives of national IP offices briefly informed about the current status of the discussed standards, their plans and expectations of the meeting.

The EAPO delegation reported that since January 2019, EAPO began publishing EAPO authority file in WIPO Standard ST. 37 format, as well as presentation in accordance with the Standard ST. 96 and dissemination of CPC data assigned to front file Eurasian patent documents.

The Task Force Leader presented the progress report, the participants of the session discussed changes in the XML Standard ST.96 regarding recommendations for processing information using XML, as well as proposals for the visual presentation of XML data for electronic publication, considered XML Schemas for patents, industrial designs and other subject matters, including data on the legal status of patents and authority files.

The discussion of the new WIPO Standard for web services in the field of intellectual property information and documentation was continued. This Standard will contain recommendations for the principles of web services’ design in order to speed up data processing and exchange in a consistent manner via the Internet. Reports on developing web services for the processing of data on the legal status of protection documents were also presented.

According to the results of the meeting, the participants defined further cooperation on the improvement and harmonization of approaches to the processing, publication and exchange of information in the field of intellectual property at the international level. The report of the Session will be submitted to WIPO Member States for consideration at the regular session of the Committee on WIPO Standards.