Product guide · Brands
The OEPM archive is free. The maintained company bridge is not.
A legal company name is not always the name customers recognise. A restaurant, product or website may trade under a name that never appears in an ordinary BORME company search. OEPM publishes trademarks and nombres comerciales that can help bridge that gap.
But OEPM supplies holder names, not a verified company NIF. BORMEAPI therefore returns name-based candidate links with provenance, not official ownership or identity. That boundary belongs at the beginning of the product story, not in a disclaimer after the result.
Free files still create an operating system
The bulk archive looks simple until it becomes a dependency. In our backfill, several large yearly ZIP files repeatedly arrived without a valid ending. A retry could stop at a different point, so a clean HTTP response did not prove a complete year. Later files stopped carrying applicant details alongside each right, moving holder recovery to another service with different availability and response fields.
Historical records also change shape. Some omit the property kind, some contain malformed years, and co-applicant information is not equally available through every source path. OEPM changed XML/XSD publication details again in 2026. Each case requires a documented fallback, replay and coverage check; silently filling the gaps would make the search look more certain than the source supports.
This is where a tutorial is misleading. Downloading one file is easy. Keeping four decades queryable after the next format or endpoint change is the product.
Linking a holder is a resolution decision
A database join cannot create an identifier that OEPM does not publish. The maintained layer uses a precision-first cascade:
- accept an exact, unique normalised legal name;
- remove the legal form only when one company remains;
- use province to disambiguate, never to override a contradictory identity;
- separate foreign entities and bodies outside the Mercantile Register;
- leave every unsupported homonym ambiguous or unresolved.
Every accepted link retains the OEPM application reference, raw holder name, first observation and match method. That makes the result reproducible when normalisation changes. It also keeps a source fact (“OEPM published this holder name”) separate from our inference (“this BORME company is the unique compatible candidate”).
The same discipline separates nombre comercial from trademark. A trading name can be an alternative name for an undertaking. A trademark can identify a product. Treating both as company aliases would turn useful discovery data into false identity evidence.
What the Hosted API makes queryable
The API supports search from a brand or trading name to candidate companies and reverse lookup from a company to linked industrial-property records. Brand search returns the name kind, company candidate, OEPM reference and a general name-matching caveat. Reverse lookup additionally exposes available status and dates. Commercial names and trademarks remain separate.
As of 24 August 2026, the maintained dataset had processed 1,336,218 OEPM rights and linked 424,343 records to company candidates across 182,846 companies. Those are dated operational counts, not a promise that every source record has a holder or that every name can be resolved.
Why pay when the archive is public?
Payment is not for exclusive access to OEPM data. It is for the maintained bridge the archive does not provide:
- acquisition across changing bulk and service interfaces;
- replay and completeness checks for damaged or partial deliveries;
- historical schema normalisation without inventing missing values;
- conservative company resolution with explicit ambiguity;
- provenance carried into every forward and reverse lookup;
- one query surface alongside the company's BORME-A history.
That changes the customer outcome from “we downloaded XML” to “we can explain why this name may belong to this company, and where the evidence came from.”