Application: EPO’s Data Resources Department is responsible for collecting patent-related data, which involves interfacing with about 100 patent oi ces all over the world. EPO Data Resources wanted to develop the Data Flow Platform, an enterprise application to streamline operations for all the data collection processes. In addition, EPO planned to develop a Data Flow Language (DFL, a Groovy domain specifi c language) to leverage similarities in the processes for communicating with each individual country’s patent oi ce, and transform them into a single, universal process.
Challenge: All the processes for communicating with other patent oi ces were developed on an ad hoc basis over the EPO’s 32 year history, using mainframe technologies, mainly COBOL. In addition, EPO developers created pre-processing technologies using dif erent scripting languages.“We wanted to get rid of all that and have something more streamlined on a single platform using one set of technologies,” explains Philippe Delebarre, Data Flow Platform Manager for EPO. Click here to read more…




