Technology and Data Standards Area Working Group (TDSA)
Until last year (2008) this WG was the Trilateral/WIPO Standards Working Group; under the new ITG governance the name was changed to TDSA. The WG reports to the ITG. The mandate of the WG can be found here:
- TDSA Mandate
This is under continuing revision depending on the priorities set by the ITG.
The WG, under different names and governances, has been working for many years on the development and publication of standards mainly in online filing, publication and data exchange. All of these standards are, or have been, used around the world for the daily processing of millions of patent files. Over the years the WG has written, or been a major contributor to, the following WIPO standards:
- ST.30: Standard ST.30: Magnetic tape format for the exchange of data and documents (December 1991)
- ST.31: Character sets for the exchange of patent documents (October 1996)
- ST.32: Markup of patent documents Using SGML (November 1995)
- ST.33: Data exchange of facsimile information of patent documents (February 1999)
- ST.35: Data exchange of mixed-mode published patent information on MMMT (December 1999)
- ST.36: Processing of patent information using XML (November 2007)
- ST.40: Facsimile images of patent documents available on CD-ROM (April 1993)
For all the above see: http://www.wipo.int/standards - PCT Administrative Instructions , Annex F: Standard for Filing and Processing in Electronic Form; see: Annex F
- The Common Application Format; see: CAF
There have been many modifications and updates to the above standards via WIPO committees, task forces, etc.
The WG usually meets once per year but mainly works via email. It has close cooperation with WIPO who normally attend the meetings. The last meeting was in Tokyo in July 2008 and the minutes of that meeting can be found here:
The next meeting will be held at the USPTO in Washington (May 2009) where the WG will cover the following topics among others:
- Actions from last meeting
- Any new Trilateral PFCs / PFRs (Proposal for change to ST.36 / Annex F)
- Revision of Annex F (USPTO)
- CAF implementation (JPO, all)
- Mark up of PCT forms (JPO)
- ISR (EPO and JPO) - progress on implementation of ISR in XML
- Packaging standard proposal (EPO)
- Corrections mark up proposal (EPO)
- XML replacement for ST.25
- XML4IP - progress on element names, schemas etc (JPO, all)
- Exchanging dictionaries (all)
- OPS / web Service standards
The list above mentions PFCs / PFRs; these refer to Proposals for Change/Revision of Annex F and ST.36 respectively. These are covered by WIPO SCIT Task Forces where the members of the WG have active participation in several groups, see particularly:
