The Structure and Dynamics of Scientific Knowledge - Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization - page 192

Fig. 5.23 Landscapes of patent class 360 for four 5-year periods. Olympus's patents are shown
in blue ;Sonyin green ; Hitachi in green ; Philips in magenta ;IBMin cyan ; and Seagate in red
(Reproduced from Figure 1 of Boyack et al. 2000 )
Many patent search interfaces allow users to search by specific sections in patent
databases, for example by claims. Statistical analysis and intuitive visualization
functions are by far the most commonly seen selling points from a salesman's patent
analysis portfolio. The term visualization becomes so fashionable now in the patent
analysis industry that from time to time we come across visualization software tools
that turn out to be little more than standard displays of statistics.
A particularly interesting example is from Sandia National Laboratory. Kevin
Boyack and his colleagues ( 2000 ) used their landscape-like visualization tool
VxInsight to analyze the patent bibliographic files from USPTO in order to answer
a number of questions. For example, where are competitors placing their efforts?
Who is citing our patents, and what types of things have they developed? Are there
emerging competitors or collaborators working in related areas? The analysis was
based on 15,782 patents retrieved from a specific primary classification class from
the US Patent database. The primary classification class is class 360 on Dynamic
Magnetic Information Storage or Retrieval . A similarity measure was calculated
using the direct and co-citation link types of Small ( 1997 ). Direct citations were
given a weighting five times that of each co-citation link. These patents were
clustered and displayed in a landscape view (See Figs. 5.23 and 5.24 ).