The messages that flow between corporate IP departments, service providers, external counsel, and registers when work is being done on patent and other IP assets — formalized, validated, and transport-agnostic.
WIPO standards describe what is in patent records, how documents are structured, and how offices communicate with applicants — ST.3 office codes, ST.16 document kinds, ST.27 legal-status events, ST.96 representation. They do not address the multi-actor operational layer above the asset model: the messages exchanged between actors about the work itself.
The IP Operations Protocol standardizes exactly that layer, and nothing else. It consumes data conformant to WIPO standards, produces events that align with WIPO categorizations, and references WIPO-governed structures wherever doing so is operationally feasible.
| Layer | Standard |
|---|---|
| Document content | WIPO ST.96, office schemas |
| Bibliographic data | WIPO ST.96 — aligned, via this protocol's Asset Reference |
| Legal-status events | WIPO ST.27 — aligned, via this protocol's Register Event |
| Operational messages between actors | This protocol — the gap WIPO does not address |
Every exchange is a message: a common envelope — addressing, provenance, authority assertions — wrapping a typed payload. Messages cover the full operational arc: bootstrapping assets from registers and IP-management systems, decomposing goals into milestone chains, authorizing and executing work across actors, handing off prepared actions, running long-lived monitoring subscriptions, authorizing and confirming payments, carrying register events, and resolving disputes that can't be auto-settled.
One canonical asset URN; descriptive office identifiers on ST.3 / ST.16; per-actor entity resolution.
Every change is an authority claim plus a data assertion — provenance and permission are explicit, never assumed.
Goals decompose into milestone chains, authorized and executed across multiple actors with confirmation windows.
Conflicting claims and missing register confirmations surface as explicit disputes and close with a recorded decision.
The protocol ships as more than prose. The complete message surface is defined in JSON Schema (draft 2020-12) as the @ipproto/schemas package, with generated TypeScript types and a reference validator. A normative profile defines how assets are identified and resolved. And a reference resolver demonstrates the identity model against live patent-family data.
The canonical specification lives in its public repository; the versioned schemas are served as a machine-readable package. Schema identities are host-independent URNs (urn:ipproto:schema:0.1:<name>), so the contract is stable regardless of where it's hosted.
v0.1 is published by a single independent maintainer under open licenses, so adoption can grow without gatekeeping. That is a deliberate posture: an independent, openly licensed specification with clear authorship and a dated publication record is neutral prior art that closes an operational gap and advances no single vendor's schema. As implementers adopt the protocol, governance is intended to broaden into a consortium — preferably anchored by corporate IP stakeholders. No consortium exists today; this describes the intended path.