Patentat scraping

patentat graphic

Participants: Hans Lammerant, Julie Boschat Thorez, Barbara Prada

Because of the extensive amount of official online databases with information on potatoes, the participants looked for a starting point that allowed a different reading throughout these online architectures. They developed a Python script that scrapes 'patentats', patentat being a neologism obtained by the contraction of 'patent' and 'patate'. The extraction of lists of names of potato varieties could be combined with the names of the patentat owners and, for example, accompany the results of the Potato Families project. Another approach could be to create a timeline that shows how the phenomenon of patentats requests has exploded over the last years. After being rejected several times from the server of the European patentats database, they finally discovered the open service Lens. The most active patentats applicants are Lays, Smitsol for Mcdonald's fries and McCain.