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Experimenting with Transparency: USPTO Patents Dashboard

The United States Patent and Trademark Office is launching a new data visualization center that will be useful to anyone with an interest in patent-office systemics, history or the politics of innovation.

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Experimenting with Transparency: USPTO Patents Dashboard
Early last week, David Kappos, director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, announced the public launch of a project of USPTO's newly formed data visualization center. Called Patents Dashboard, the system depicts the work of the Office in terms of key performance indicators graphically depicted on needle gauges and bar-graphed over prior months, with prior fiscal year data (back to 2009) also available.

The presentation is useful to anyone with an interest in patent-office systemics, history or the politics of innovation. It shows and documents six traditional metrics of PTO performance: the amount of time an application sits until its first examination and mailing of notice to the applicant ("First Office Action Pendency"), total time to a decision, applications in backlog, applications processed per fiscal year, steps required in processing an application and the current number of patent examiners.

To these, it adds a brace of new, more analytical measures of "pendency" relating to the different paths an application can take through the system, including time spent due to filings of Requests for Continued Examination, and other variables.

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