USITC

McNair Project

USITC
Project Information
Project Title	USITC Data
Owner	Harrison Brown
Start Date	9/11/2017
Deadline
Primary Billing
Notes	In Progress
Has project status	Active
Copyright © 2016 edegan.com. All Rights Reserved.

Files

My files are in 2 different places: Did development work here

E:\McNair\Projects\USITC

I had to use to the Postgres SQL server to download the PDFS The Postgres SQL Server:

128.42.44.182/bulk/USITC

Additional Information

There is more information that the USITC provides besides 337 notices.

Here is information and a database on Section 701/731

https://www.usitc.gov/trade_remedy/trade_research_tools
https://pubapps2.usitc.gov/sunset/

JSON Information

The tab-delimited test files are here

XML Information

There is an XML file that contains information on investigations. To get it go to the link below and 'xml' link that is under the tab that under 'Cases instituted after October 2008'.

https://pubapps2.usitc.gov/337external/

The information that is found this file can be grabbed with an XML parser. For each investigation, we can find out

• Investigation Number ex - (<entry key="investigationNo">966</entry>)
• Date of publication Notice - (<entry key="dateOfPublicationFrNotice">2015-09-24T04:00:00.000Z</entry>)
• Title ex - <entry key="title">Silicon-on-Insulator Wafers</entry>
• There is an entry for patent numbers, ex - <entry key="patentNumbers">
• Investigation Type ex - <entry key="investigationType">Violation</entry>
• Respondents can be found under <entry key="respondent">
• Complainant can be found under <entry key="complainant">

Additional information can also be gathered from the XML document

To find information on cases prior to 2008, go to the link above and click on 'Looking for cases instituted prior to October 2008?', and it will download a csv file.

• The investigation number, Title, Unfair Act Alleged, Patent Numbers,Complainants, Respondents, can be grabbed easily from the CSV
• Target Date, Beginning and Ending Dates contain notes (some cases are extended and dates are changed)and so we may need to do some text processing to grab this information

Old Work

This is the work that was done before I knew about the XML files provided by the USITC (see Alternative Solutions section below)

Here is a csv of the data that I have been able to scrape from the HTML of https://www.usitc.gov/secretary/fed_reg_notices/337.htm The results.csv file found here,

E:\McNair\Projects\USITC

For every notice paper, there is a line in the CSV file that contains the Investigation Title, Investigation No., link to the PDF on the website, Notice description, and date the notice was issued

I have also downloaded the PDFS from the website. These are the pdfs from the links that are in the csv file. Some of the PDFS were not able to be downloaded. The PDFs are here

E:\McNair\Projects\USITC\pdfs_copy

These files were downloaded using the script on the Postgres Server. There are issues downloading PDFs onto the remote windows machine for some reason. You must download the PDFs on the Postgres Server and transfer them to the RDP. The script to download the PDFS is

128.42.44.182\bulk\USITC\download

Using the pdf scraper from previous project found here

E:\McNair\software\utilities\PDF_RIPPER

You can scrape the PDFs. This file was modified to scrape all of the pdfs in the pdfs folder. The modified code is in the McNair/Project/USITC/ directory and it is called pdf_to_text_bulk.py

An example of PDF parsing that works is parsing this pdf: https://www.usitc.gov/secretary/fed_reg_notices/337/337_959_notice02062017sgl.pdf

E:\McNair\Projects\USITC\Parsed_Texts\337_959_notice02062017sgl.txt

There are PDFs where the parsing does not work completely and the text is scrambled.

I have started using NLTK to gather information about the filings. See code in Projects/USITC/ProcessingTexts I am working on extracting the respondents from these documents.

Alternative Solutions

Here is where you can get data on the USITC 337 notices instead of extracting this information from PDFs

337Info - Unfair Import Investigations Information System

https://pubapps2.usitc.gov/337external/

This link has links to Complaints. Most of the data that can be gathered is there and it is in a nice format that could be easily web scraped if we needed to. They have a query builder (link below). There is also a link that download all of the raw data in JSON or XML.

Here are links to various statistics we could use: Section 337 Statistics: Settlement Rate Data

https://www.usitc.gov/intellectual_property/337_statistics_settlement_rate_data.htm

Section 337 Statistics

https://www.usitc.gov/press_room/337_stats.htm

Section 337 Statistics: Number of New, Completed, and Active Investigations by Fiscal Year (Updated Quarterly)

https://www.usitc.gov/intellectual_property/337_statistics_number_new_completed_and_active.htm

Section 337 Statistics This contains links to various other pages with statistics

https://www.usitc.gov/intellectual_property/337_statistics.htm

Here is a dictionary of terms used in these Documents

https://www.usitc.gov/documents/337Info_ext_DataDictionary.pdf

There are FAQs listed here

https://www.usitc.gov/documents/337Info_FAQ.pdf

There is a query builder for Section 337 Notices Here

https://pubapps2.usitc.gov/337external/advanced

To use you must select fields from the GUI at the bottom of the page