Names vs. Entities: Choosing the Right Tool for Your Workflow

IFI CLAIMS offers three services that help you work with company names and patent ownership data: the Names API, Entities Pro, and the Entities Stream. On the surface, they may seem to overlap — all three can tell you who owns a patent and what subsidiaries a company has. But they're built for different workflows, different levels of depth, and different types of questions. Understanding which one fits your use case can save significant time and effort.

Here's a practical guide to telling them apart.

Before you can analyze a company's patent portfolio, you need to be sure you're searching for the right name. Company names in patent records are messy — misspellings, abbreviations, name changes after acquisitions, and regional variations all create noise that skews results.

The Names API is IFI's solution to that problem. It gives you access to IFI's standardized company names, which have been curated and cleaned to resolve exactly these kinds of variations. You can search by a partial or approximate name, look up a company by its stock ticker, find the ultimate corporate parent of a subsidiary, or retrieve a list of all subsidiaries under a given parent.

A typical Names API workflow might look like this:

You're building a patent analytics application and a user types "Google" into a search field. Before running any patent queries, you call the Names API to confirm the correct IFI standardized name — in this case, "Google LLC" — and discover that its ultimate owner is "Alphabet Inc." You then use those validated names to run accurate searches in CLAIMS Direct, confident that you're capturing the right set of documents.

The Names API is deliberately lightweight. It is a lookup and validation service. It does not return patent counts, family statistics, or citation data. Think of it as the foundation that the other two services build upon.

Best for: Name validation and disambiguation; applications where users search by company name or ticker; any workflow where accurate assignee identification is the first step.

Once you know which companies you're looking at, Entities Pro answers the next natural question: what does their patent portfolio actually look like?

Entities Pro is a REST API which is available as a separate data subscription. It returns summary statistics for an entire corporate hierarchy — meaning the ultimate owner and all of its subsidiaries combined. With a single call, you can retrieve the total number of patent publications, a breakdown by granted patents versus applications, active and lapsed family counts, and forward and backward citation totals. Instead of querying each subsidiary individually and aggregating the results yourself, Entities Pro does that work for you in one request.

A typical Entities Pro workflow might look like this:

You're building a competitive intelligence dashboard for a financial services client. They want a high-level view of a company's IP position — how many active patents do they hold? How does their citation profile compare to competitors? With Entities Pro, you can populate those dashboard cards with a handful of API calls, one per company. The stats are aggregated at the ultimate owner level, so the numbers already reflect the full corporate family.

A few things to keep in mind: Entities Pro statistics cover the full lifetime of the hierarchy, with no ability to filter by date range. And because the statistics aggregate across the entire hierarchy, you can't use Entities Pro alone to break down what portion of a portfolio belongs to a specific subsidiary. It also updates weekly, so it reflects a recent but not real-time picture.

Best for: Portfolio dashboards and executive summaries; competitive benchmarking at the company level; applications that need patent statistics without requiring an on-site data installation.

The Entities Stream is for organizations that need to go beyond aggregated counts and work directly with the underlying patent data tied to corporate hierarchies.

Rather than an API you call, the Entities Stream is a PostgreSQL database schema that is optionally installed as part of your on-site CLAIMS Direct data warehouse. It contains the same corporate hierarchy data as Entities Pro, but adds a critical capability: a direct link between company entities and individual patent publication records (UCIDs) in IFI Snapshot countries. This means you can take any company or hierarchy and retrieve the actual list of patent documents that make up their portfolio — then analyze those documents using any data point available in CLAIMS Direct.

Some examples of what this unlocks:

• You want to compare two competitors' patent portfolios by technology area. With the Entities Stream, you can retrieve all UCIDs from countries included in IFI Snapshots for each corporate hierarchy and group them by CPC classification, giving you a direct breakdown of where each company is innovating.

• You receive a patent document and need to know who ultimately owns it. The Entities Stream lets you trace from that UCID directly to the standardized ultimate owner, without having to know the assignee name at all.

• You need to monitor changes in a company's IP position over time, tracking which subsidiaries are filing new applications. Because the Stream updates incrementally throughout the week, you can build processes that detect changes as the data refreshes.

The Entities Stream also supports fully custom SQL queries. You're not limited to pre-built functions — you can join entity data to patent metadata, filter by status or publication level, and build whatever analysis your application requires.

This flexibility comes with a higher setup cost. The Entities Stream requires an on-site CLAIMS Direct installation, and generating the patent-publication linkage and statistics tables involves additional initialization steps. But for organizations already running an on-site data warehouse, it can be a very powerful tool. See Working with the Entities Stream to learn more about what you can do with this service.

Best for: Building complete patent portfolios from corporate hierarchies; portfolio analysis grouped by technology class, geography, or status; custom analytics pipelines; any use case requiring access to individual patent documents tied to a company.

In practice, these services work together rather than as alternatives. Many workflows begin with the Names API to confirm the right entity names, then use Entities Pro for a quick portfolio overview, or the Entities Stream for deeper investigation. Understanding where each service starts and stops is the key to using them efficiently.

For more information or to discuss which services fit your use case, reach out to your IFI CLAIMS representative.