Spatial distribution of the known asteroids

Spatial distribution of known asteroids in solar syste

Sighting and trajectory analysis for periodic comets- 1975-1986

Sighting data and trajectory analysis for mission to periodic comet

Digest report - Missions to the outer planets

Digest of advanced planning reports on orbiter missions and flyby flights to outer planet

A Survey of Missions to Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto

Flyby and orbiter missions to Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto using nuclear electric low thrust stage and Saturn-Centaur launch vehicle

Nano Mapper: an Internet knowledge mapping system for nanotechnology development

Nanotechnology research has experienced rapid growth in recent years. Advances in information technology enable efficient investigation of publications, their contents, and relationships for large sets of nanotechnology-related documents in order to assess the status of the field. This paper presents the development of a new knowledge mapping system, called Nano Mapper (http://nanomapper.eller.arizona.edu), which integrates the analysis of nanotechnology patents and research grants into a Web-based platform. The Nano Mapper system currently contains nanotechnology-related patents for 1976–2006 from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), European Patent Office (EPO), and Japan Patent Office (JPO), as well as grant documents from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) for the same time period. The system provides complex search functionalities, and makes available a set of analysis and visualization tools (statistics, trend graphs, citation networks, and content maps) that can be applied to different levels of analytical units (countries, institutions, technical fields) and for different time intervals. The paper shows important nanotechnology patenting activities at USPTO for 2005–2006 identified through the Nano Mapper system

A study of patent thickets

Report analysing whether entry of UK enterprises into patenting in a technology area is affected by patent thickets in the technology area

Prediction of Emerging Technologies Based on Analysis of the U.S. Patent Citation Network

The network of patents connected by citations is an evolving graph, which provides a representation of the innovation process. A patent citing another implies that the cited patent reflects a piece of previously existing knowledge that the citing patent builds upon. A methodology presented here (i) identifies actual clusters of patents: i.e. technological branches, and (ii) gives predictions about the temporal changes of the structure of the clusters. A predictor, called the {citation vector}, is defined for characterizing technological development to show how a patent cited by other patents belongs to various industrial fields. The clustering technique adopted is able to detect the new emerging recombinations, and predicts emerging new technology clusters. The predictive ability of our new method is illustrated on the example of USPTO subcategory 11, Agriculture, Food, Textiles. A cluster of patents is determined based on citation data up to 1991, which shows significant overlap of the class 442 formed at the beginning of 1997. These new tools of predictive analytics could support policy decision making processes in science and technology, and help formulate recommendations for action