Background

This project was initiated during the WIPO Symposium for IP Authorities in September 2009. The starting point for the project is a request from the IP Offices of Australia, Canada and UK (The Vancouver Group offices) for WIPO to provide a platform for the sharing of search and examination documents in order to facilitate work sharing between the offices. Note that the Vancouver Group offices intend to operate a work sharing programme, not a mutual recognition system.A new platform is required because no common platform exists that would meet the requirements. In particular, patent search facilities would be required, supported by a database of patent bibliographic data. The system must also be secure and, eventually, support features such as collaborative examination, workflow, etc.The platform will not be unique to the Vancouver Group. It will be extensible to other work-sharing programs, in particular:

New offices that may join the Vancouver Group
New groups of offices with similar work-sharing agreements between them (Latin American offices, ASEAN, etc)
Collaborative examination in the PCT international and national phases (see the PCT Roadmap)
The revised WIPO ICE service (International Cooperation for Examination) under which offices with capacity and experience provide assistance to smaller and less-experienced offices. The project and system will be known as WIPO CASE (Centralized Access to Search and Examination).WIPO-CASE (version 1.0) was first released into production in March 2010 has very basic functions:
Bulk upload of documents and bibliographic data
Access to search and examination reports through simple search by application or publication number, optionally including additional types of documents uploaded by participating Offices

Project Status

The last major release CASE 2.3 was made available on April 1, 2014 to link WIPO CASE with the JPO's One Portal Dossier Interface.

WIPO intends to post a proposal to improve the usability of the web portal for examiners and seeks for Offices' feedbacks. Further details will be published here.

All project related documentation are available here.

Data coverage (from 3 March 2011 to 27 August 2013)

The following statistics cover approximately applications filed since 2000.

Note: AU does not store documents in CASE since the release of version 2.1, on July 20, 2012. Following an issue reported by IP Australia, we identified that the statistics provided in the past few months excluded the number of documents hosted by IPA which were accessed through CASE web services. The below statistics about document usage are now corrected. The online statistics function will be corrected shortly.

Office	No. of Applications	SPEC(Specifications)	CSEX(Claims Searched or Examined)	SRST(Search Statement)	EXRP(Examination report)	SIST(Search Information Statement)	A15R(Article 15(5) search report)	SRSG(Search Strategy)
GB	55018	93922	30126	3268	54338	0	0	0
CA	230059	40	0	0	0	0	0	0
AU	376317	212659			186920		21	112478

Total	660394	306621	30126	3268	241258	0	21	112478

System Usage from 3 March 2011 to 27 August 2013

Registered users per Office

Office	No of Users
GB	11
CA	465
AU	12
Total	488

Document usage

Depositing Office	No of Accessed Documents	Accessing Office	Total
AU	10645	AU	437
		CA	9506
		GB	609
		NZ	93
CA	107	AU	55
		CA	18
		GB	34
GB	9698	AU	7624
		CA	1691
		GB	361
		NZ	28
Total	20456