1. PatentViz Mike Wooldridge and Ken Langford Information Visualization and Presentation Fall 2005

2. 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).

3. 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).

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

5. Example Patent

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

7. 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 Citations in Measures of “generality” and “originality” based on citations

8. 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.

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

10. Three Directions Tree Map Scatter Plot Graph

11. 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)

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

13. Tree Map (3-Level)

14. Scatter Plot (www.patentviz.com)

15. Citation Graph

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

17. Comments/Suggestions?