docdb-mcp

An MCP server that resolves patent publication numbers to their canonical DOCDB identifiers.

What it does

Given a country code and publication number, resolve_docdb_id returns candidate records with canonical DOCDB ID (including kind code), first inventor, publication date, and family ID. This is useful for asserting that DOCDB identifiers are correct, or for recovering properly normalized DOCDB identifiers from citations that appear in different formats across documents:

• US 8,000,000 (Greenberg) → US8000000B2

Installation

Option 1 — Hosted endpoint (no install)

A public MCP server is available at https://docdb.sarl-graip.fr/mcp using the streamable HTTP transport. Configure your MCP client to point at it directly:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "docdb": {
      "type": "streamable-http",
      "url": "https://docdb.sarl-graip.fr/mcp"
    }
  }
}

No API key or credentials required.

Option 2 — Local install via uvx

Add this to your MCP client configuration (Claude Desktop, Continue, Cursor, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "docdb": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["docdb-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "DOCDB_API_URL": "https://docdb.sarl-graip.fr"
      }
    }
  }
}

uvx installs and runs the package in one step — no virtualenv needed.

Tool reference

resolve_docdb_id(cc, number)

Parameter	Type	Description
cc	str	Two-letter DOCDB country code, e.g. "US", "EP", "WO"
number	str	Publication number without kind code, e.g. "8000000"

Strip the kind code before calling. The kind code is the trailing letter+digit suffix (B2, A1, A2, U1). Passing it returns an empty list, not an error.

"US8000000B2"  → cc="US",  number="8000000"
"EP1234567A1"  → cc="EP",  number="1234567"
"US 8,000,000" → cc="US",  number="8000000"

Returns a list of records (empty list = no match):

[
  {
    "docdb_id":  "US8000000B2",
    "inventor":  "ROBERT J. GREENBERG",
    "date_publ": "20110816",
    "family_id": "39183031"
  }
]

Multiple records mean the same publication number has several document variants (e.g. an A1 and a B2 of the same application).

License

MIT