WASHINGTON – The US Department of Commerce’s United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) launched PatentsView(link is external), a new patent data visualization platform. The PatentsView beta search tool allows members of the public to interact with nearly 40 years of data on patenting activity in the United States.
According to the USPTO, PatentsView allows users explore technological, regional, and individual-level patent trends via search filters with multiple viewing options. The database links inventors, their organizations, locations, and overall patenting activity using enhanced 1976-2014 data from public USPTO bulk data files.
“As America’s Innovation Agency, the USPTO is the public steward of a tremendous treasure trove of data of great value to present and future innovators, business leaders and policy makers,” said Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO Michelle K. Lee. “We are always working to improve the discoverability, accessibility, and usability of the USPTO’s valuable patent and trademark information.”
The USPTO will host a one-day PatentsView Inventor Disambiguation Technical Workshop Thursday, September 24. The goal of the workshop is to encourage the development of novel approaches to reveal inventor identities across nearly 40 years of US patent data. For more information and to RSVP, please contact USPTO’s collaborator in PatentsView and the event, the American Institutes of Research (AIR), at cssip@air.org(link sends e-mail).
PatentsView is a critical element of the President’s Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government(link is external). Anyone can use PatentsView to examine the dynamics of inventor patenting activity over time and space while exploring patent technologies, assignees, citation patterns and co-inventor networks. The visualization platform encourages the study and understanding of the intellectual property (IP) and innovation system; serves as a fundamental function of the government in creating “public good” platforms in these data; and eliminates wasteful and redundant cleaning, converting and matching of data by many individual researchers. PatentsView frees up researcher time to allow them to focus on what they do best—studying IP, innovation, and technological change.
Development of PatentsView began in 2012 as collaboration between the USPTO, USDA, the Center for the Science of Science and Innovation Policy(link is external), the University of California at Berkeley(link is external), Twin Arch Technologies, AIR, and Periscopic(link is external). The beta platform will continue to evolve and expand, with public input encouraged as development moves forward.