Data quality

How Pinakel treats office data, what is generated rather than published, and the known issues to plan around.

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How office data is treated

• As stated. Values are what the office published. Pinakel maps them to common fields and keeps the office’s own wording where the mapping loses detail (status.office_status, source_record).
• No defaults. A value the office did not state is null. Pinakel does not compute expiry dates, infer countries from addresses, or copy one date into another.
• No silent corrections. Typing errors in office data, such as a year 0201, are passed through. They are easy to spot and Pinakel does not guess the intended value.
• Generated values are labelled. Translations and transliterations can come from the office or be generated by Pinakel; see below.

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Generated values

Field	Source
mark.translation	The office’s translation when it publishes one, otherwise a machine translation by Pinakel.
mark.transliteration	The office’s transliteration when it publishes one, otherwise a Latin-script transliteration generated by Pinakel.
goods_services[].translation	The office’s translation, or a machine translation by Pinakel.
parties[].name_translated	As published by the office, where it publishes one.
parties[].name_key	Always generated: see Parties and name keys.
status.value, status.category, mark.feature, mark.kind	Mapped by Pinakel from the office’s values.

Machine translations are search and reading aids. Do not quote them as the legal text of a specification.

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Known issues

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Implausible dates

Dates before 1800 or in the future are returned as stated. They sort as undated (last, in both directions; expiry dates count as dated up to 50 years ahead), and a date-range filter still compares the stated value. See Dates.

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Designations in the WO register

When an international registration lists designations under both the Madrid Protocol and Article 9sexies of the Protocol, only the Article 9sexies designations are currently kept. designated_countries can therefore be incomplete for records in the WO register. Check WIPO’s record before relying on the list of designated countries; a fix is planned.

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Status and dates in the WO register

• dates.application and dates.registration are both the international registration date, and both identifier fields hold the international registration number.
• status.value is registered while the expiry date is in the future and cancelled after it, as of the last time Pinakel processed the record (source.processed_on). It does not reflect partial cancellations, refusals in individual designated countries, or dependency on the basic mark. Use the national designation records for the state of protection in a country.

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Status mapping

Offices use their own legal categories. The mapping to registered, pending, abandoned, cancelled and expired follows each office’s terms, so edge cases differ between registers: grace periods, suspended applications, partial refusals. A status Pinakel has not mapped yet is other, with the office’s wording in status.office_status.

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Countries of parties

parties[].country is the ISO code of the country the office states for the party. When the office gives only an address, country is null even if the address names a country.

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Numbers

Application and registration numbers are kept in the office’s format. The same number can appear in several registers and, in some offices, more than once in the same register. Always combine a number lookup with jurisdiction, and match on more than the number. See Identifiers.

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Removed records

When an office deletes a record, the API does not announce it in v1. The record may stop being returned (404 on retrieve) or keep its last known state. See How records change.

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Coverage depth

Some registers do not include their oldest records, because the office does not publish them in a form Pinakel can load. earliest_application_year in GET /v1/jurisdictions shows how far back each register goes.

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Reporting a problem

If a record looks wrong, email [e-mail] with the record id, the field, what you expected, and if possible a link to the office’s record. Include the request_id (from the X-Request-Id header) of the response you looked at.

When the office’s own record is wrong, Pinakel cannot correct it; the record changes when the office corrects it.

Measured quality studies are published in Research.