Our customer Cambridge Intellectual Property announced yesterday their new API for a collection of 55 million patents – 48 million more than Google Patents. It’s great to see a Cambridge company innovating in this space, especially as the service is powered by Apache Solr (we’ve given them some small assistance with configuring and tuning this software over the last few months).
The API, available on the Boliven website, offers a REST based service and returns patent data in JSON or XML – so users can easily integrate patent data with their own applications. It can also return PDFs or summaries of the selected patents. In addition, the API will allow users to search and query Boliven’s database of 45+ million science literature documents including journal publications and medical device trials. That’s around 100 million items in total.
Like the Guardian’s Open Platform which I wrote about previously, this is a great example of open source search technology as a platform for new delivery methods – showing how effective (and economical) it can be at this large scale.
It didn’t take me long to find my own small contribution to the patent landscape.
