Researcher Expertise Portal – Phase 3
Project phases
- Phase 1 - Fostering Research and Innovation with the Researcher Expertise Dashboard
- Phase 2 - Researcher Expertise Dashboard - Phase 2
- Phase 3 - Researcher Expertise Portal - Phase 3 (current page)
The Innovation Partnerships team, in collaboration with the UBC Cloud Innovation Centre (UBC CIC), has developed a prototype to aid in the identification of potential research collaborations. The prototype aggregates publicly available data, primarily from the STEAM area, on research activity into one centralized portal.
Approach
In addition to federal research funding data aggregated in phase two, the Innovation Partnerships team and the CIC pulled data from the European Patent Office (EPO)’s Open Patent Service (OPS) to further populate the portal, providing a clearer view on researchers’ activity at UBC.
The portal contains patent data from the US and Canada dating back to the year 2001. Users can navigate through the available patents using the Patent Classification Filter, in which there are nine main sections as managed by the EPO and US Patent and Trademark Office:
- Human necessities
- Performing operations; transporting
- Chemistry; metallurgy
- Textiles; papers
- Fixed constructions
- Mechanical engineering; lightings; heating; weapons; blasting engines or pumps
- Physics
- Electricity
- General tagging of new technological developments
Clarifications on these categories can be seen by hovering over the (i) symbol on the portal. Users are also able to search for patent numbers and application status, contributing inventors, the date in which it was published, and other relevant information.
Supporting Artifacts
Architecture Diagram
USER INTERFACE
Technical DetaiLs
Patent data is fetched from the EPO’s Open Patent Service by making a GET request to the specific API endpoint that returns bibliographic data for patent publications. The query will return all patent publications from the year 2001 up to the date on which the patent pipeline is invoked. Similar to the second phase, patent data retrieved from the EPO’s Open Patent Service will be cleaned and reformatted before it is stored inside an S3 bucket in the form of CSV files.
Next, inventor names are compared with the researchers in our RDS PostgreSQL database using Jaro-Winkler distance to determine the appropriate match. After each patent entry is name-matched, it is assigned a corresponding ID associated with the researcher in the database. Only patents with at least one matched researcher as an inventor will be saved. This data is eventually replicated onto AWS Opensearch using Data Migration Service (DMS), allowing users to access the information on the front-end web app.
Link to solution on GitHub: https://github.com/UBC-CIC/Research-Innovation-Dashboard
Acknowledgements
UBC Office of Vice-President, Research and Innovation
Photo by: Martin Dee on Flickr
About the University of British Columbia Cloud Innovation Centre (UBC CIC)
The UBC CIC is a public-private collaboration between UBC and Amazon Web Services (AWS). A CIC identifies digital transformation challenges, the problems or opportunities that matter to the community, and provides subject matter expertise and CIC leadership.
Using Amazon’s innovation methodology, dedicated UBC and AWS CIC staff work with students, staff and faculty, as well as community, government or not-for-profit organizations to define challenges, to engage with subject matter experts, to identify a solution, and to build a Proof of Concept (PoC). Through co-op and work-integrated learning, students also have an opportunity to learn new skills which they will later be able to apply in the workforce.
