A New Visualization Method for Patent Map : Application to Ubiquitous Computing Technology

As technologies develop in faster and more complicated ways, it is getting more important to expect the direction of technological progresses. So many methods are being proposed all around world and one of them is to use patent information. Moreover, with efforts of governments in many countries, many patent analysis methods have been exploited and suggested usually on the basis of patent documents. However, current patent analysis methods have some limitations. In this paper, we suggest a new visualization method for a patent map, which represents patent analysis results with considering both structured and unstructured items of each patent document. And by the adoption of the k-means clustering algorithm and semantic networks, we suggest concrete steps to make a patent map which gives a clear and instinctive insight on the targeted technology. In application, we built up a patent map for the ubiquitous computing technology and discussed an overall view of its progresses.