Patent Landscape Maps

Advantage ™ Patent Analytics

Patent Landscape Maps™

Patent Landscape Maps™ start with a patent or group of patents ("Starting Set") and show the patents that the Starting Set cites as prior art ("Backward Citations") and the patents that cite the Starting Set ("Forward Citations"). Landscape Maps help you explore the people, companies and technologies that are the landscape around the Starting Set. There are two types of landscape maps: Single Patent Landscape Maps Multi-Patent Landscape Maps
Single Patent Landscape Maps™
Single Patent Landscape Maps show the direct citations between a single patent being mapped, the Backward Citation Patents it cites as prior art and the Forward Citation Patents that cite the patent being mapped. This type of map does not show any citation relationships among the Backward Citation Patents or the Forward Citation Patents. For this reason a Single Patent Landscape Map often looks like a "butterfly". The following example is a Single Patent Landscape Map for U.S. Patent 6,000,000 "Extendible method and apparatus for synchronizing multiple files on two different computer systems" by Jeffrey Hawkins (this is the basic synchronization patent for the Palm Pilot):
	The horizontal (x-axis) is time. Each box on this map is a U.S. patent. The boxes are oriented in time with the left edge of each patent box aligned with the patent's issue date. The tail to the left of the box shows when the patent was filed in the United States. Landscape Maps start with a patent or group of patents ("Starting Set") and show the patents that they cite as prior art ("Backward Citations") and the patents that cite them ("Forward Citations"). Landscape Maps help you explore the people, companies and technologies that are the landscape around the Starting Set. The lines connecting the patent boxes are the prior art citation references. At the time this map was prepared the Hawkins patent had been cited by 94 other patents. These are shown as the large "fan" that flares out to the right of the map. The patent boxes are color coded at the top to show the Current Assignee/Owners of the patents, which include IBM (17 patents with red top) and Research-in-Motion (15 patents with blue tops). Click on the map to launch a "live Interactive Map" in a new window. On the Interactive Map you can access the Patent Detail Menu by right clicking on a patent box.
Multi-Patent Landscape Maps™
Multi-Patent Landscape Maps start with 2 or more patents ("Starting Set") and then show the the Backward Citation Patents they cite as prior art and the Forward Citation Patents that cite the patents being mapped. This type of map will show any cross citations of the Forward Citation Patents to the Starting Set and any cross citations by the Starting Set of the Backward Citation Patents. This type of map does not show any citation relationships among the Backward Citation Patents or the Forward Citation Patents. The following example is a Multi-Patent Landscape Map for U.S. Patent 6,000,000 "Extendible method and apparatus for synchronizing multiple files on two different computer systems" and U.S. Patent 6,272,545 "System and method for interaction between one or more desktop computers and one or more mobile devices":
	The horizontal (x-axis) is time. Each box on this map is a U.S. patent. The boxes are oriented in time with the left edge of each patent box aligned with the patent's issue date. The tail to the left of the box shows when the patent was filed in the United States.. The large "fan" at the top of this map is U.S. 6,000,000 and the smaller fan at the bottom is U.S. 6,272,545. Notice the group of Forward Citation Patents in the right center of the map. These cite both the 6,000,000 and the 6,727,545 patents. Click on the map to launch a "live Interactive Map" in a new window. On the Interactive Map you can access the Patent Detail Menu by right clicking on a patent box.