Agenda for bringing PatZilla and Patent2Net closer to each other

PatZilla Development / Entwicklung
#1

Introduction

About two years ago, I reached out to Roberto Faga and Celso Vanderlei of Patent2Net fame [1] and finally got in touch with David Reymond from Institut Universitaire de Technologie (IUT) at the Université de Toulon as well as Luc Quoniam, professor and doctor of information and communication in science at different university in France.

Patent2Net seems to be their brainchild altogether and they still want to bring it forward and to a wider audience.

We discussed some ideas revolving around how we could build a P2N with PatZilla features (or a PatZilla with P2N features) together.

Work done so far

Shortly after reaching out to David, we have been able to make some contributions to improve the Patent2Net codebase [2], which have been received well within the P2N community.

After that, the core developers took over again and continued maintaining and improving the P2N codebase which is now located at [3].

Thoughts

We would well still like to work on bringing Patent2Net and PatZilla closer together. In order to realize this and other things, we’ve added a generic fullscreen dialog [4] for displaying cross-referenced things within PatZilla. We did this consciously while definitively still looking at displaying results and visualizations there which have been crunched and enriched through the utilities from Patent2Net. While the fullscreen dialog itself [4] is not really made of any rocket science at all, we decided to take the chance to move towards TypeScript and integrate Material-UI [5] as well in order to go into the direction of using next-generation user interface frameworks. This should well reflect our intentions here.

Saying this, we’d like to integrate the full scope of the p2n command line interface into such fullscreen dialogs on the first hand. Both the idea and the goal here would be to be able to interactively refine queries to OPS using PatZilla and then to drill down into analytics coming from Patent2Net.

Outlook

Within this conversation, we will try to collect and outline some thoughts on how to improve the general user experience for both installing and using PatZilla together with Patent2Net.

[1] Patent2net · GitHub
[2] Proposal for improving the Patent2Net code base
[3] GitHub - Patent2net/P2N-v3: Open source patent analytics toolkit
[4] [ui] Add fullscreen dialog based on Material-UI · ip-tools/ip-navigator@b08f8e8 · GitHub
[5] [ui] Introduce TypeScript and Material-UI · ip-tools/ip-navigator@693e69e · GitHub

#2

Objectives I

Abstract

We would like to improve the user experience to streamline and optimize the whole research process when working with the Patent2Net toolkit.

Status quo

Currently, users will have to

  • Install the software on their own machines, which is sometimes a daunting and time-consuming process and might break more often than not.
  • Acquire and configure their individual OPS credentials.
  • Manually edit some configuration files for adjusting the CQL search expression.
  • Invoke appropriate p2n actions on the command line to a) acquire the data, b) preprocess the data and c) run different processing steps on the data.
  • Invoke a browser to display the resulting data.

Goal

The steps outlined above will be folded into an immersive graphical user interface where the user will be able to perform the respective actions interactively and iteratively. This will add additional comfort and increase its efficiency, thus making the toolkit much more approachable.

We would also like to encourage more people to try out the different tools and would like to humbly start growing a community of like-minded people around it.

Tasks

We would like to work on these specific topics.

  • Improve user experience for creating a search expression and running analytics on it by invoking specific P2N processing steps from within PatZilla.
  • Improve user experience when installing the software. Better use Docker these days.
  • Look at classroom scenarios where the teacher would provide an OPS account for a number of students which should only be valid during a specific time range where the course would take place.
  • Investigate best ways how students might just use https://patzilla.ip-tools.io/ instead of / additionally to installing the whole software stack on their own machines.

Scope

While not all features of P2N will be able to converge with PatZilla right away, we would like to provide a framework and respective interfaces between both software toolkits for doing so. In that manner, we would like to encourage other developers to contribute.