Visualizing Online Search Results of USPTO Patent Database

This paper presents an intermediate system between users and a patent search engine. The online patent database provides Web pages as search results, and the system extracts parameters from those pages to visualize the search results. Patents are divided into many fields, such as title and assignee name, and the patents with the same value of a field can be classified as a group. Citation analysis is a key technique in many applications of patent analysis, and we use citation to identified relationships between the patents. The system provides a tree view to visualize a patent and citations of the patent, and then force-directed placement algorithm visualizes the indexing search results of a collection of patents with a dynamic view for the different fields. Depending on interaction of the users and the interface, the visualization moves patent dots to shape different field citation network. The users can navigate the view by zooming into or out of regions of interest. Optionally, field labels and citation links maybe shown by the system. Finally, potential improvements identified during the study are discussed, as are future directions for this approach to collection browsing.