Trying to access USPTO external database

[kdawg440]

I am trying to access the US Patent and Trademark office database. I am extremely new at this database stuff, But I am a novice programmer. I know HTML and Java.
The XML files can be downloaded here.
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/uspto ... -text.html

However I do not know how to open it in either base or calc. I do not need the full text/images of the patents, just the owners of each patent, when they were owners, the type of patent(design, or utility), and maybe some other author data.

Please help.

[Villeroy]

The page does not provide any database access. From that page you can download snapshots of some database in XML format. I don't know which software is supposed to be used with the specific flavour of XML. May be there is some database software for this. Then you may connect Base to such a database.
May be you can write (or download) some XSLT script which converts this specific XML to Calc's specific XML. Then you can view the contents in Calc.
Someone may have written some specific software to handle this XML.

[kdawg440]

Thanks for the reply. Yes the USPTO website has some information on a document type definition (DTD). However Even when I downloaded this file I was unable to get anywhere.

This page has sample documents and DTD's, but you need to go to google for the XML file.
http://www.uspto.gov/products/xml-resources.jsp

There is a .XSL style sheet burried in the files along with various .dtd files. I have learned that .XSL files are used to turn .xml files into other .xml files. (also confusing)

Even whith the DTD the files in google (^see above) cannot be opened in browsers or base or calc.

[Villeroy]

XML is no file format. It is a meta-file format. XML lets you define your own descriptive file formats within a clear set of rules. It's completely up to you how to process these data. I can not help without diving into the guts of that particular file format.
The publishing institution is the one and only authority which can be of any help here but the general idea is that you read XML data into your own application.

[eremmel]

If you know java it is not difficult to write a small java program that takes an URL and DTD (or alike) and writes a csv that can be used as source for calc (and used as a database table). But there is also a tool from oracle that exposes XML files via a JDBC connector. I'm not sure if it is free, but there might other alike solutions. Google is just your friend.