The Technology Behind VIPS

The Visual Intellectual Property Search (VIPS) tool enables a distinctive, visually facilitated search of patents filed and software created across all the Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories. The patent content contained within this tool is collected from the United States Patent and Trademark Office 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.

VIPS charts and graphs, displaying different measurements related to IPs, innovators, and other categories
With VIPS, patent and software IP can be grouped to reveal general patterns and trends in the data. This “Lab View” page summarizes the IP generated at a particular laboratory. Through various charts and graphs, these views tell a story about the volume of IP produced over different periods of time, who were the innovation leaders generating different forms of IP, and what areas of science were the focus for the laboratory’s R&D activities.

This tool was created building upon earlier innovations and technologies developed by the Human Centered Computing Group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), such as 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.

Screenshot of the VIPS search page, with Taxonomy Viz and Meta Data appearing on the left side, and IP Results and Topic groups appearing on the right.
The VIPS “Search” page is the primary tool for users to search, discover, and browse IP generated across the national laboratories. Users can perform traditional text, date, and metadata searches to look up specific IP. For exploration and discovery workflows, users can drill down in using the taxonomy visualization to filter IP related to specific scientific domains. All these interactions and filters work together to produce a set of relevant IP that users can quickly review and inspect for more detail.

VIPS is brought to you by the DOE-Office of Technology Transitions (DOE-OTT) in collaboration with PNNL, as well as partners Idaho National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermilab, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories. The work is funded by Award Number 1024007 of the Technology Commercialization Fund Program, administered by the DOE-OTT.

For more information on the VIPS state of development and licensing details, please visit the VIPS Intellectual Property web page or reach out to PNNL’s commercialization team.

Test out the VIPS technology by trying your first search today at vips.pnnl.gov.