Visualizing collaborations and technology landscapes with interactive sociograms

Patents and publications provide information on the relationships between players in different technologies, and can give a picture on the maturity and development of the technologies. This information can be visualized in sociograms where organisations are represented by nodes and edges signify collaborations between them. Such sociograms are useful for analysing players and collaborations within technology fields, and how these evolve over time. The patent and publication documents needed to create these sociograms can be acquired from various sources; however, the dataset needed can be huge, thus making it difficult and time-consuming to collect and present the data in an intuitive manner. This paper discusses how a set of software tools can be used to gather and visualize this data, to gain understanding of different technology landscapes, and provide a means to perform a deeper analysis of the organisations involved and the technologies themselves. Furthermore, a novel way to access these sociograms is proposed, by navigating through higher-level sociograms of interconnected technologies, where connections between those technologies signify co-occurrences of them in papers and/or patents. This is an improvement to traditional navigating through menus or lists, which tend to become confusing and overwhelming, when the amount of information is vast and hard to categorize unequivocally.