Updates on our tools, website, and upcoming events

It’s springtime in the United States, the season for growth and change. Our work at PatentsView continues to move ahead; with our growing user base and data team, we are trying new things and exercising our creativity. This can be seen on our Gender & Innovation topic page which now features an interactive data visualization made by some of our team members using PatentsView data. Also new to the topic page are annualized data files made in partnership with USPTO data scientists. These annual files are yearly and contain disambiguated information on patents, their assignees, inventors, and inventor gender. Smaller, more malleable data packages are a new thing for us – so let us know what you think!

Tools

The Query Builder, ElasticSearch API, and original MySQL API are up to date with 2021 quarter 4 data from USPTO (data through December 30, 2021) as of March 28, 2022. The PatentsView team has been working to create additional endpoints in the ElasticSearch API (version 0.1) which will eventually replace the MySQL interface for PatentsView data. To date, over 100 beta users are engaging with the E.S. API. Our team is appreciative of the feedback we have received so far and look forward to additional improvements and additions as the year progresses.  

Data Updates

The bulk data download tables are still the biggest and most exhaustive collection of raw and processed data that our team has to offer. We monitor for updates to disambiguation methods and algorithms so that we can continue to improve the disambiguation of location, inventor, assignee, and lawyer information. It also helps us to improve when users of PatentsView data share errors they find in disambiguated results with our team – so, thank you, it really does make PatentsView stronger.

Our next data update will publish in September 2022 and include quarters 1 and 2 of data for 2022. The PatentsView data science team is taking a break from data update activities through the months April to July to devote all resources toward making planned structural changes to the bulk data download and API products we offer. The next communication from our team will outline these structural changes and how this may affect bulk data download and API users.

During this four-month period, the data available from the API(s) and Query Builder functions will also remain up to date through December 30, 2021. All PatentsView features will be updated in September with data through June 30, 2022.

Upcoming Events

PatentsView, with support from AIR, is hosting the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s Gender and Race Attribution Symposium in August 2022. The symposium is a full-day virtual event aimed to bring together computer scientists, information scientists, economists, and others to discuss the state-of-the-art approaches to and current applications of name-to-gender and name-to-race attribution algorithms. The symposium will review methods and applications to provide an overview of current approaches from leading scholars in the field, and to build knowledge, identify a community of practitioners, and facilitate the application of common approaches. Stay tuned for the save the date announcement from our team!