Manual of Patent Examining Procedure - MPEP

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900 Prior Art, Classification, and Search

902.03(b) Patent Classification Home Page on the USPTO Intranet

The address for the Patent Classification Home Page on the USPTO Intranet is http://ptoweb:8081/ . The Classification Home Page is also accessible from the desktop via the Patent Examiner's Toolkit . The site is the clearinghouse for classification information published in Hyper-Text Mark-up Language (HTML) and Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Examiners and the public are provided with access to identical information for the Index, Schedules , and Definitions.

The classification Intranet site also includes links to information such as USPC-to-IPC(7) Concordance, IPC (7) and IPC (6) Schedules, IPC(7) Guide, WIPO Handbook on Industrial Property Information and Documentation and to national (U.S.) information such as Classification System Overview, Classification Bulletins, and the Patent Classification Retrieval system (PCRS).

The PCRS provides Original (OR) and Cross-Reference (XR) classification information for individual patents and listings of patents contained in subclasses. This data is updated bimonthly with new issues, withdrawn patents and reclassifications.

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