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The AIDS Patents System

Information about the software.

The Search System

The system we use for searching the text of the AIDS patents was developed at CNIDR. It provides basic full text search capabilities, including:

We plan to release a cleaned-up, documented version of the search system to the public in the near future. We plan to do a couple of weeks worth of interoperability testing and bug fixing through the AIDS Patents Project before the beta release.

The Network Interface

We provide two distinct network interfaces to the AIDS Patents. The primary access mechanism is through the CNIDR ANSI Z39.50 Version 2 server. This server supports both bib-1 and STAS attribute and element sets. The server is part of the CNIDR Z-Dist release. We provide more information about Z-Dist on the CNIDR Web server.

For more information about this server, please send mail to Kevin Gamiel (Kevin.Gamiel@cnidr.org).

Our secondary access mechanism is through World Wide Web via a WWW->Z39.50 gateway also developed at CNIDR. This gateway is known to work with all flavors of NCSA Mosaic, as well as MacWeb and WinWeb from EINet.

Patent Formatting

The AIDS Patents are stored in their native "Greenbook" format. Here is a sample: 
PATN                                                                            
WKU  04303645                                                                   
SRC  6                                                                          
APN  141447                                                                     
APT  1                                                                          
ART  125                                                                        
APD  19800418                                                                   
TTL  Modified living canine parvovirus vaccine                                  
ISD  19811201                                                                   
NCL  18                                                                         
ECL  1                                                                          
EXP  Rose; Shep K.                                                              
INVT                                                                            
NAM  Carmichael; Leland E.                                                      
CTY  Ithaca                                                                     
STA  NY
This marked-up data is converted into a generic internal representation when the patent is requested by the user. It is then converted into one of two supported forms; Simple Unstructured Text Record Syntax (SUTRS), more commonly known as plain text, or HTML. Since conversion occurs "on-the-fly", the appearance of patents can be altered without affecting hot lists or requiring massive reformatting or significant down-time. Please give us your feedback about the format of the patents.

Patent Images

The bitmap images of US Patents are provided to CNIDR by USPTO in a compressed G4 format with a non-standard header. We use a Unix derivative of the STTOTIFF software developed by Dave Trafton of USPTO to create the G4 compressed TIFF images accessable under this system.

Image access is provided through a generic image server developed at CNIDR as part of the AIDS patents project, and other current development projects.

The Developers

This system was developed at US Patent and Trademark Office and the National Science Foundation.

Data last updated on 9/17/94