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.

A new version of the CASE portal is under development and a preliminary release will be made available in October 2014.to Offices in demonstration mode for their comments.

Data coverage (from 3 March 2011 to 22 December 2014)

The following statistics cover approximately applications filed since 2000.

Note: AU, CN, JP and WO application data and document are not stored in CASE and are made available through web services by the depositing Offices. SG and VN are accessing Offices only.

System Usage from 3 March 2011 to 12 September 2014

Registered users per Office

Document usage (will be updated soon)