• 2004
• Concept Map
• Exhibit map

Daniel Kutz is a Ph.D. student at the School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University. His research interests lie in social informatics, interaction design, and information visualization. He designed the featured map to visually understand and communicate the intellectual coverage and evolution of the patent space of different patent holders.

Patents granted between January 1, 1976 to December 31, 2002 were obtained from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patent archive. A simple graph shows the 140% increase in the number of patents granted over the last 25 years.

The 2.5 million patents are further grouped by their classification and changes in the number of patents per class were examined in five year intervals. Slow and fast growing classes are depicted and contrasted using treemaps, a space-filling technique developed at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland. To compare the evolving patent holdings of Apple Computers and a private patent holder, treemaps were placed in a time sequence. Longitudinal comparison at the classification level becomes possible revealing an assignee’s past and current intellectual borders, patenting behavior, and maybe even a general understanding of research and development trends.