Trust

Methodology

We group every spelling of an owner and every subsidiary into one company record, and we show each trademark exactly as its office reports it. Here is how that works.

Isometric drawing of the record pipeline: office feeds, a normalization gantry with mark, date and class cards, a record store, a change event, an index tower and a query station.

How a trademark record moves through Signa.

  1. 01Collect. Connectors pull records from each office and remember where they stopped.
  2. 02Normalize. Names, dates, classes and status map to one common shape.
  3. 03Preserve. The record is stored, with the office's original values kept.
  4. 04Publish. Each change is published as an event.
  5. 05Index. The search index is updated from the stored record.
  6. 06Query. The API searches the index and returns one consistent response.

From owner names to one company

Each company page is built in four steps. Every company record keeps the evidence behind its matches.

  1. Step 1

    Collect every owner name

    Registers store the owner as free text, so one company shows up under many spellings: APPLE INC., Apple, Inc., Apple Computer Inc.
  2. Step 2

    Normalize and match

    We compare normalized names together with country and address signals to cluster the spellings that belong together.
  3. Step 3

    Anchor on identifiers

    Where they exist, the GLEIF Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) and, for listed companies, the stock ticker tie the cluster to one real company.
  4. Step 4

    Link the corporate family

    GLEIF parent and child relationships connect subsidiaries to their parent, so a company page can show the whole group.

When the match is wrong

Resolution is probabilistic, not perfect. If two records were merged by mistake, or should be merged, use the corrections workflow.

How we count marks

An international registration through WIPO’s Madrid system names several countries at once. On company, firm, attorney and collection pages we group it with its country designations and count it once, so totals are not inflated by the number of countries a filing covers.

Office, country and market-wide totals work differently: they add up each office’s own register. An international registration is on WIPO’s register and, once designated, on the register of each covered office, so it counts at WIPO and again at each of those offices.

Where a page counts each country separately, it says so next to the numbers.

Collecting the data

We collect records directly from official trademark offices, and from WIPO’s Madrid system for international filings. Each office is synced on its own schedule; see data freshness.

Records are mapped to one common shape (mark text, status, dates, Nice classes, owners and proceedings) while keeping the original office values. We do not change what a record says; see the disclaimer.

Statistics and totals

Figures on the statistics and collections pages are counted over the records Signa tracks when the page was built. They describe our coverage, not every register in the world.

Headline totals, office counts and the share of marks still active all come from one source: the live office feed, summed across the offices Signa covers. Breakdowns by Nice class come from a separate report that is recomputed less often, so those pages state the date it was computed.