March 5, 2004

Trademark Daily XML Files - Weekly Status Report

Inquiries can be made to: Ed Johnson at Ed.Johnson@uspto.gov - (703) 306-2621 or Marva Dubar at Marva.Dubar@uspto.gov - (703) 305-1669 or sent to OEIP@uspto.gov.

The following is a status update on new inquiries and outstanding items.

New This Week:

*The status on the availability of the 2003 Annual Trademark (Retrospective) files is as follows:

-The 2003 Trademark Retrospective Assignment/XML file is available for purchase.

-The 2003 Trademark Retrospective Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB)/XML file is available for purchase.

-The 2003 Trademark Retrospective Live/XML and the Trademark Retrospective Dead/XML files will be available the week ending March 12, 2004.

There are 4 new inquiries in this Weekly Status Report. Reference New Inquiries:

There are 13 inquiries dating back to June 6, 2003.

*1 has been resolved. Reference (2).

*2 are open and are being investigated to determine why applications are missing from the daily files. Reference Inquiries (1) and (3).

*1 is open to correct erroneous design codes (4).

*1 is open for a software update to eliminate error records from being present in the daily files (5).

*1 is open that requires software and documentation changes to provide appropriate information that is present in TESS, TARR and BISX (8).

*1 is open that is awaiting a policy decision from the Commissioner for Trademarks Office (9).

*5 are being analyzed to ensure that valid UTF-8 characters are used. These 5 remain on schedule to be resolved by March 30, 2004. Reference Inquiries (6), (7), (10), (11) and (12).

*1 “The use of Country Codes” is open with the appropriate staff evaluating a resolution (13).

Inquiries that have been resolved will have the resolution in black, bold, italicized and underlined.

Any inquiries that require additional research and/or response are considered outstanding inquiries and will appear in red, bold and italicized.

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New Inquiries:

Inquiry – 02/27/2004: (1)

Application 78326480 was never present on the Daily Application file.

Application 78326480 appeared in the Trademark Image 24 Hour Box on December 2, 2003 and on the December 2003 Trademark Monthly Status created and disseminated Tuesday, January 6, 2004.

Why was it never present on the Daily Application file?

3/5/2004: An investigation is taking place to determine why it was never present in the Daily Application file. A status update will be provided in the next Weekly Status Report of 3/12/2004.

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Inquiry – 03/03/2004: (2)

This regards the assignment file: as040302.xml.

The frame-number in the following assignment begins with the letter X. Is this valid?

<assignment-entry><assignment><reel-no>423</reel-no><frame-no>X537</frame-no>

The Assignment Division stated that there are some old records that contained a duplicate frame-number and to make them unique an alpha character was place in the first position.

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Inquiry – 03/03/2004: (3)

The following 1,293 applications appear on TARR but have never appeared in the 24 Hour Box or the daily application XML file. They contain a Status-Code of “630” – “not assigned to an examiner”. They all have very recent filing dates:

Range:	Total
78367250 - 78367349	99
78367475 - 78367549	74
78367650 - 78367725	75
78368075 - 78368374	299
78368400 - 78368700	300
78368950 - 78368999	49
Sub-total for 78	896
76575350 - 76575374	24
76575500 - 76575849	349
76575925 - 76575949	24
Sub-total for 76	397
Total missing Serial Numbers:	1,293

3/5/2004: NOTE: Since this inquiry was received some of the applications have been present on the daily application XML file.

3/5/2004: It does appear that some were not present because all of the data fields are not present and they are considered skeleton records. Further investigation is taking place. A status update will be provided in the next Weekly Status Report of 3/12/2004.

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Inquiry – 03/04/2004: (4)

Within the last week, we've seen 3 records come in with design code 271707:

1. 76569844
2. 78364427
3. 78365776

We've found no description or information on this code. Please inform us as to what this code means.

3/5/2004: This inquiry has been forwarded to the Trademark Operations area for resolution. It appears that design code 271707 was entered in error and the correct design code should have been 261707. Further evaluation and corrections will be made and the status provided in the next Weekly Status Report of 3/12/2004.

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Outstanding Inquiries:

Inquiry – 02/26/2004: (5)

In the tt040225.zip file, there are three numbers (proceeding-entry) with no property-information. They are 92042952, 91159572 and 91159577. Using BISX on the USPTO website, none of these are available. We've been having about three of these a day within the TTAB daily feed -- they are different proceeding numbers but it is almost a daily occurrence that we see a proceeding number with no property-information present.

3/5/2004: These records have been created in error and should not be present. The software is being changed to eliminate these errors from appearing in the daily disseminated file. A status will be provided in the next Weekly Status Report of 3/12/2004.

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Inquiry – 02/05/2004: (6)

Characters such as diacritical marks appear not to be handled properly. In the daily file dated 20040120 two examples (SN 79000127 and SN 7900022) the umlauted lu (ü) and the circumflexed a (â) that appear in
the city names Zürich and Neuchâtel are not provided as ISO entity variables "&#252;" and "&#226;" respectively. Meanwhile, other characters, such as punctuation, are rendered correctly, e.g. the ampersand "&" is sent as "&#38;".

3/5/2004: All 3 Trademark Daily DTD’s are being analyzed to ensure that valid UTF-8 characters are being used and corrected by March 30, 2004.

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Inquiry – 02/06/2004: (7)

While processing XML File xml\040205\ap040205.xml an invalid UTF-8 character (Unicode: 0x4) was found in the element content of the document.

3/5/2004: All 3 Trademark Daily DTD’s are being analyzed to ensure that valid UTF-8 characters are being used and corrected by March 30, 2004.

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Inquiry – 11/12/2003: (8)

This inquiry was initially received 11/12/2003. A further clarification (as defined below) of the initially inquiry was received 03/02/2004.

There are fields available on TARR for an Application/Registration that has requested protection into a Madrid Protocol country that do no appear in the current DTD of the daily application file being disseminated. They are:

USPTO Control Number:
Original Filing Date with USPTO:
Date of Last Irregularity:

The other data fields included in the Madrid Protocol Information section on TARR are fields that appear in the current DTD of the daily application file being disseminated.

What we'd like is to have this information sent to us in the daily file being disseminated when the Application/Registration has been applied for and then updated with the additional Madrid related fields upon BIRTH from the IB.

The second part of the question goes to timing -- how long from the time the Applicant/Registrant requests protection under Madrid Protocol to another country will this information become available to us?

And how long before the USPTO sends it to WIPO? How long before WIPO makes it available in their Madrid Express database?

3/5/2004:

1. A decision has been made by management that the Daily XML files will contain appropriate information that is present on TESS, TARR and BISX including the above 3 data fields. Software and documentation must be evaluated and updated. Status of this effort will be reported each week until completed.

2. The answer to the second part is currently rather difficult due to the enormous backlog volume at the International Bureau (IB). The USPTO has just recently processed applications with IB filing dates for the beginning of November 2003.

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Inquiry – 10/31/2003: (9)

Correspondent and owner information are provided.

It is requested that the telephone number, the fax number and email address, if available information, for the correspondent and owner be provided.

3/5/2004: This inquiry is awaiting a policy decision from the Commissioner for Trademarks Office.

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Inquiry – 10/9/2003: (10)

The TTAB daily file continues to contain illegal characters. I thought this issue would be resolved by now. Here is an excerpt from my log: 2003-10-09 02:09:14 tt031008.xml error: Parse error occurred - An invalid XML character (Unicode: 0x12) was found in the element ...

3/5/2004: All 3 Trademark Daily DTD’s are being analyzed to ensure that valid UTF-8 characters are being used and corrected by March 30, 2004.

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Inquiry – 9/17/2003: (11)

All the XML files are supposed to be in UTF-8 format.

The following file TTAB tt030701.xml has ASCII value 146 twice in the following line.

ADMIN</charge-to-employee-name><status-update-date>20021008</status-
update-date><status-code>9</status-code><party-
information><party><identifier>260024</identifier><role-code>D</role-
code><name>PAT O'BRIEN'S BAR, INC.</name><property-
information><property><identifier>245280</identifier>

The single quotes being sent to us are not in UTF-8 format.

This type of error can also be found in other TTAB xml files:

tt030515.xml
tt030711.xml

This is brought up because the TTAB files are still being produced with invalid characters

3/5/2004: All 3 Trademark Daily DTD’s are being analyzed to ensure that valid UTF-8 characters are being used and corrected by March 30, 2004.

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Inquiry - 7/16/2003: (12)

Here is some more information/errors....

Processing XML File ==> xml\030620\tt030620.xml
start:: Wed Jul 16 12:05:31 EDT 2003
[Fatal Error] tt030620.xml:145:67181: An invalid XML character (Unicode: 0x12)
was found in the element content of the document.
error: Parse error occurred - An invalid XML character (Unicode: 0x12) was
found in the element content of the document.

[Fatal Error] tt030621.xml:144:390195: An invalid XML character (Unicode: 0x12) was found in the element content of the document.
error: Parse error occurred - An invalid XML character (Unicode: 0x12) was found in the element content of the document.

Processing XML File ==> xml\030625\tt030625.xml
start:: Wed Jul 16 12:14:58 EDT 2003
[Fatal Error] tt030625.xml:141:728318: An invalid XML character (Unicode:
0x12) was found in the element content of the document.
error: Parse error occurred - An invalid XML character (Unicode: 0x12) was
found in the element content of the document.

Processing XML File ==> xml\030626\tt030626.xml
start:: Wed Jul 16 13:05:46 EDT 2003
[Fatal Error] tt030626.xml:143:292294: An invalid XML character (Unicode:
0x12) was found in the element content of the document.
error: Parse error occurred - An invalid XML character (Unicode: 0x12) was
found in the element content of the document.
All of the characters 0 through 31 and character 127 are nonprinting control
characters. With the exception of characters 09, 10, and 13, (Ox09,
Ox0A, and Ox0D) the others may NOT appear anywhere in an XML document.

3/5/2004: All 3 Trademark Daily DTD’s are being analyzed to ensure that valid UTF-8 characters are being used and corrected by March 30, 2004

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Inquiry – 6/06/2003: (13)

In reviewing the country codes for each of the 3 XML files and discovered the following

*Trademark-Applications XML

Uses 3 digit code from TWTF file

*Trademark-Assignments XML

Uses no codes at all, they expand all codes (Spelling out countries)

*Trademark-Proceedings XML

Uses officially designated country as prescribed by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standard ST.3

3/5/2004: Evaluation of this inquiry continues in the Office of Data Architecture and Services. A status update will be provided in the next Weekly Status Report of 3/12/2004.

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If you have any questions or need additional information please contact one of the following individuals:

Ed Johnson	Marva Dubar
Information Products Division	Information Dissemination
Data Dissemination Branch	Systems Division
(703) 306-2621	(703) 305-1669
(703) 306-2737 Fax	(703) 308-5164 Fax
Ed.Johnson@uspto.gov	Marva.Dubar@uspto.gov