Looking for assistance with obtaining data from nested JSON data

Question

Hello,

I am hoping someone can provide some advice on how to extract data from the following dataset - https://ped.uspto.gov/peds/ If you click on the JSON tab for the entire dataset, I am trying to work with the 2020 portion of the dataset.

Anyways, I am beginning a project to obtain patent examiner statistics (how many office actions are issued per examiner, average number of office action issued by examiner, etc.).

The issue is that the dataset is nested - a lot. I would like to first pull each unique patent examiner name and then traverse the dataset based on the patent examiner name to calculate statistics from the "Transaction History".

In short, are there any good methods in Python for running through a nested JSON dataset? Or should I be looking at tackling this project from a different vantage point. Thanks!

Answer 1

Hello, and thanks for the question!

In short, yes, Python is one of the easier languages to use for working with JSON data. Python core has a json module you can import that parses them and turns them into Python dictionaries.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/json.html

If you have a dataset as a string, you can just use:

import json

json_dictionary = json.loads(json_string)

patent_bulk_data = json_dictionary["PatentBulkData"]

patent1 = patent_bulk_data[0]

patent_case_metadata = patent1["PatentCaseMetadata"]

application_number_text = patent_case_metadata["applicationNumberText"]

# All in one access if you wanted to do it on one line:

number_text = json_dictionary["PatentBulkData"][0]["PatentCaseMetadata"]["applicationNumberText"]

# and so on...

If you want to loop over them, you can simply iterate over each key in the dictionary using "dictionary.items()". Since a dictionary (hashmap) is the same structure as a JSON (set of key:value pairs), it translates nicely.

Hope that helps!