The IPOS API for trademark search
Access 864K Intellectual Property Office of Singapore records via API. Normalized data, sub-second response, and daily sync — all through Signa's unified trademark API.
Search IPOS in one POST request.
One REST endpoint. Filter by offices: ['IPOS'] to scope to ~864K IPOS records, or drop the filter to search every office.
Sub-300ms p95 on IPOS queries
Exact, phonetic, fuzzy, and prefix strategies in one request.
Canonical status & raw code preserved
status.primary for filtering, status.raw_code if you need it.
Verifiable freshness
Every record includes updated_at.
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864K records
IPOS register indexed and queryable through one endpoint.
Daily sync
Database synced regularly with IPOS's source publication.
100% field accuracy
Validated against IPOS source data across a 4,800-field spot-check audit.
Normalized schema
41 raw IPOS status codes mapped to a canonical status object — same shape across every office.
What is IPOS?
The Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) is the statutory board under Singapore's Ministry of Law that examines and registers trademarks for the Republic of Singapore. With around 50,000–60,000 applications filed per year and one of the fastest examination tracks in the region (roughly nine months to first action under standard prosecution), IPOS is widely treated as the regional IP hub for ASEAN — many multinationals route their first Asia filing through Singapore before fanning out to neighbouring jurisdictions.
Singapore acceded to the Madrid Protocol in 2000, and Madrid designations now make up close to a third of all IPOS trademark records. The office runs the IPOS Digital Hub — a public web tool for browsing the register — and the IPOS Go mobile app for filing and renewals. There is, however, no general-purpose public REST API for full-featured trademark search. Bulk trademark data is published on data.gov.sg as a monthly CSV snapshot (resource d_6145acb2130bf781165258e76a584383, roughly 3.5 GiB across 16 flat columns and 23 nested JSON arrays).
Signa ingests the data.gov.sg snapshot end-to-end, normalizes Singapore's local conventions (internal {ISO}{NN} owner-country codes, eighteen markStatus values, twenty-three classStatus codes, and forty-four event codes) into the same canonical schema used for USPTO and EUIPO, and serves it through the same API. Because IPOS publishes monthly, fresh records arrive in waves rather than continuously — but we poll daily so a new snapshot is queryable within twenty-four hours of publication.
Unique features
- ASEAN IP hub — Singapore is the preferred first-filing jurisdiction for many multinationals expanding into Southeast Asia
- Madrid Protocol member since 2000 — ~29% of IPOS records are International Registrations designating Singapore
- Fast examination — standard prosecution typically reaches a first action in around 9 months; an Accelerated Initial Examination track is available for eligible applications
- IPOS International — the office's advisory arm provides IP strategy and valuation services in addition to registry operations
- Two-month opposition window from publication (one of the shorter windows globally; extensions are available on request)
- Multilingual marks supported — ~7% of records contain Chinese characters or transliteration, concentrated in pre-2000 filings
- Bulk data published openly via data.gov.sg as a monthly CSV snapshot — no auth required, replaces a frozen v1 endpoint that capped earlier development at 29,994 records
- Series marks (5.65% of corpus) are stored as one row per part rather than nested — important to know when computing application counts
IPOS Digital Hub + data.gov.sg CSV vs Signa.
IPOS gives you two front doors. The Digital Hub is a web search interface — great for one-off human lookups, no good for programmatic access. The data.gov.sg bulk CSV is a 3.5 GiB monthly snapshot with sixteen flat columns and twenty-three nested JSON arrays per row. There is no general-purpose public REST API for full-featured trademark search; an optional IPOS_API_KEY exists only to raise rate limits on a narrow per-application query endpoint. Here's what changes when you use Signa instead.
| Dimension | IPOS Digital Hub + data.gov.sg CSV | Signa |
|---|---|---|
| Setup | Download 3.5 GiB CSV from data.gov.sg, write a 23-column JSON parser, build country-code mapping, host your own search index | Sign up, copy API key, curl the endpoint |
| Search | Digital Hub web UI only — no programmatic search; you build your own from the CSV | Full-text, fuzzy, phonetic, and image search out of the box |
| Data shape | CSV with 18 markStatus values, 23 classStatus codes, 44 event codes, and internal {ISO}{NN} owner-country codes (e.g. GB02, DE01) you must remap to ISO alpha-2 yourself | Normalized JSON with canonical status object and the same schema used for USPTO, EUIPO, and 19 other offices |
| Freshness | Monthly snapshot — you check data.gov.sg manually, diff against your last copy, and re-ingest 862K rows each cycle | We poll daily, diff at the row level via lastModifiedDate, and surface changed records within 24h of a new IPOS snapshot |
| Coverage | Singapore only — add EUIPO, WIPO, USPTO separately, each with a different format | IPOS + 20 other offices through the same endpoint |
If you only need Singapore data and you have engineering time to handle a monthly 3.5 GiB CSV — Singapore's own data.gov.sg bulk feed is genuinely well-published and free. Signa exists for the case where you want IPOS to look like every other office in your stack and arrive without you running a pipeline.
IPOS API — Frequently asked questions
Everything developers ask before integrating IPOS data
Need something else? See our documentation
IPOS API basics
Coverage & freshness
Need something else? See our documentation
Ready to search 864K IPOS trademarks via API?
Start with 1,000 free IPOS requests/month. 864K records indexed, normalized data across 20+ offices through the same endpoint.
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