Visual Analytics of the evolution of patent classification trees

Insights into the real-time dynamics of global technological research and development are of crucial importance in various professional domains such R&D planning, strategic investment and management consulting. Classification trees help to organize the continuously evolving archive of technological knowledge. Time is an important dimension: the varying numbers of patents in different classes reflects research trends, as well as classes are continuously redefined to include emerging technologies.  Moreover, the interactive exploration of patent dynamics at different levels of the classification hierarchy needs further attention.

 The candidate, according to the assigned scope (SE/PR/Bak/DA, see table below), has to perform the following activities: 

 

State-of-The-Art Report: write an annotated survey of existing methods and tools for the analysis of dynamic trees.

 

Basic features: prototypically implement existing visual analytics methods to be applied to the patent classification tree. 

 

Advanced features: develop new specific visual analytics method to interactively explore the dynamics of patent classification trees on different classification levels and  different scales of temporal granularity.

 

Scientific summary: summarize the scientific contribution of the work, with reflections on the lesson learned and future advancement in this research field.  

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