Seravia | Data Scientists

Do companies tip their hands by filing trademarks before a product launch? Which famous companies have products that are exposed to intellectual property squatters?

We have mined government documents to identify millions of brands, their owners and their types of use.

We are now making these details available for use in other applications or data research projects through an easy-to-use Brand API.

1. Overview
2. Request
3. Response
4. Examples
5. Datasources
6. Obtaining a Key

Overview

Suppose you want you have a product idea and want to name it ‘iBook’. One of the first things you will do is see if there are existing products with this name (there are), who owns them (“Apple” for one) and what limits there are on the use.

Using the Brand API you can submit a phrase and get in return a list of current uses, owners and publications associated with it.

Request

All of the Data APIs are RESTful and return JSON.

Domain

Each Data API uses our company domain and a dedicated “api” subdomain:

http://api.seravia.com

Version

Our Data APIs will roll out gradually and the semantics are likely to change as we add features and increase the datatypes we support. For this reason all current requests should use the “v1″ prefix:

http://api.seravia.com/v1

Action

The Technology API uses a single action called “brands”. This will return related brands, companies and publications for a single brand.

http://api.seravia.com/v1/brands

Parameters

Note: parameters must be URL encoded, including replacing blank spaces with %20.

http://api.seravia.com/v1/brands?name=iphone&api_key=XYZ

See the Examples sections for variations.

Response

The Brands API returns up to three types of data related to the technology name submitted. A typical response looks like:

{
  "aliases": [
    "made for ipod iphone",
    "My iPhone"],
  "companies": [
    "Apple Inc",
    "Icx Europe Limited"],
  "publications": [
    "my iphone",
    "made for ipod iphone",
    "made for ipod iphone ipad"]
}

Aliases

Aliases includes various other names that may be alternatives or related brands. For instance, “iphone” returns “My iPhone” and “made for ipod iphone”. We identify and score unique brands by mining millions of trademark filings and product recalls.

Each alias may be called separately to return related entities and publications associated with that name. In subsequent versions we will add the ability to include/exclude any of these aliases.

Companies

Companies includes companies or institutions with which this brand has been affiliated. For instance, “iphone” returns “Apple Inc” and “Icx Europe Limited”. These are most often owners of a trademark for that brand.

Companies are not always explicitly identified as being a company. We look at entity type, role on the filing and inclusion of certain keywords in the name to determine if it is a company. These are not always correct.

Each company may then be looked up using the Company API.

Publications

Publications are all those documents on which the person appears. The full list of document types appears here.

Examples

1. http://api.seravia.com/v1/companies?name=iphone
2. http://api.seravia.com/v1/companies?name=like
3. http://api.seravia.com/v1/companies?name=air
4. http://api.seravia.com/v1/companies?name=religion

Datasources

In the first version this information comes largely from ~10 million worldwide trademarks and product recall documents. Domain names will be added in subsequent versions.

Obtaining a Key

If you are interested in advance access, please contact us at [email protected].