Technology Overview
The Visual Intellectual Property Search (VIPS) search tool enables a distinctive, visually facilitated search of patents filed and software created across all of the Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories. The patent content contained within this tool is collected from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the software content from DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI). These records represent intellectual property (IP) generated from DOE funded research and development.
This tool was created building upon earlier innovations and technologies developed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's (PNNL’s) Human Centered Computing Group, the IN-SPIRE™ Visual Document Analysis and the Scalable Reasoning System, along with new developments allowing content from software metadata. Using advanced artificial intelligence and modeling capabilities, a tiered patent categorization system was created from the “bottom up,” enabling VIPS to develop a particular way of searching and visualizing DOE software and patents beyond a simple keyword search.
This work is funded by Award Number 1024007 of the Technology Commercialization Fund Program, administered by the Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) of the DOE.
BACKGROUND
The accelerated transition of taxpayer-funded software and technologies to the private sector is a DOE priority. To streamline the search process for prospective users and licensees of innovations stemming from all national labs, OTT selected PNNL to create, tune, and launch VIPS to:
- Document, curate, and surface technologies from the DOE national labs for prospective users and licensees.
- Provide links to opensource repositories for instant software downloading.
- Provide links to connect IP seekers with lab tech transfer offices for proprietary licensing.
Advantages
- IP that was once fragmented across multiple sites is now searchable in one place.
- Tech scouts can quickly find software and tech to augment or expedite their company’s offerings.
- Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists can visually and interactively examine IP offerings, review abstracts, and connect with commercialization representatives to assess market potential.
- Small business owners can investigate solutions for their tech and software needs.
- Opensource software users can seek out programs to utilize in their work and seamlessly connect to a download site.
- National labs can catalog and market their IP, fostering and expediting the commercialization process.
- Commercialization managers at participating national labs can follow up on direct inquiries that materialize from users of the tool.
- Users and national labs benefit from a solution that is fully automated, so the data remains current without continuous manual maintenance.
State of Development
This system leverages a data harvesting pipeline to automate the collection of data on a weekly basis. Patent applications, granted patents, and updates to patent assignments are all collected through the USPTO Bulk Data Storage System. Software records are collected through APIs hosted by OSTI and by DOE CODE, and when available, additional metadata is collected from software repositories hosted on GitHub.
The information collected is processed to normalize and standardize the data. A key enrichment is the identification and association of IP with individual national labs. The approach generally leverages the assignee metadata and the government interest clause extracted from the patent description. Each lab requires an individualized approach to account for specific relationships and associations between DOE, universities, and operating contractors.
The taxonomy used to describe the research and scientific domains for the IP is a modified version that originated from our industry partner, Tradespace. The classification of the IP is performed using natural language processing and trained artificial intelligence models.
This system can be adapted to harvest, process, and visualize data for other domains and use cases.