PatentViz

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

CitationsPotential measure of “importance”

• More citations in = greater importance

Offer an efficient way to identify relationships among patents

ClassificationControlled 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 outCitations inMeasures of “generality” and

“originality” based on citations

Goals of Visualization

Understand patent distribution. Pinpoint potentially important patents. See if importance relates to other

characteristics. Show how 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)36 subcategories (e.g. Computer

Peripherals)• 420 classes (e.g. Incremental Printing of

Symbolic Information)

Tree Map (2-Level)

Class #

Main category

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.

Comments/Suggestions?

Comments/Suggestions?