Patent Viz Mike Wooldridge and Ken Langford Information

Patent. Viz Mike Wooldridge and Ken Langford Information Visualization and Presentation Fall 2005

What is a patent? ¢ ¢ ¢ A grant of a property right by the government to an inventor. Allows the inventor to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention. Currently in the U. S. , the term of a patent is 20 years from filing with the USPTO (utility & plant patents).

Patent Data Set More than 6 million patents have been issued by the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office. ¢ More than 150, 000 new ones are issued each year. ¢ There are more than 400 patent classes, and 120, 000 subclasses (continuously evolving). ¢

Structure of a Patent ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ Patent Number Title Abstract Inventor Assignee Filing Date Issue Date ¢ ¢ ¢ Class Subclass Citations Claims Specifications Diagrams

Example Patent

Our visualization focuses on citations and classification ¢ Citations l Potential measure of “importance” • More citations in = greater importance l ¢ Offer an efficient way to identify relationships among patents Classification l Controlled vocabulary maintained by the USPTO

NBER Patent Database (National Bureau of Economic Research) Freely available, maintained at UC Berkeley ¢ 3 million patents from 1963 -1999 ¢ Includes 16 million citation records: ¢ Citations out l Citations in l Measures of “generality” and “originality” based on citations l

Goals of Visualization Understand patent distribution. ¢ Pinpoint potentially important patents. ¢ See if importance relates to other characteristics. ¢ Show patents are connected to one another. ¢

Related Work ¢ ¢ Commercial patent research tools. Visualization of scholarly citations.

Three Directions ¢ ¢ ¢ Tree Map Scatter Plot Graph

Tree Map Treemap 4. 1 UI: http: //www. cs. umd. edu/hcil/treemap/ ¢ 6 categories (e. g. Computers and Communications) ¢ l 36 subcategories (e. g. Computer Peripherals) • 420 classes (e. g. Incremental Printing of Symbolic Information)

Tree Map (2 -Level) Main category Class # Color = patent count

Tree Map (3 -Level)

Scatter Plot (www. patentviz. com)

Citation Graph

Future Work Test users. ¢ Manage the data. ¢ Integrate the different pieces. ¢

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Comments/Suggestions?