While we do not sell products or services in a traditional sense, my departments still need to be able to manage contacts and lead information to go from marketing a technology to licensing it. While having a customer relationship management (CRM) tool gives a broad sense of a solution, figuring out the details of what to implement is a challenge. A lot of our data is very simple in a sense that records have a number of fields specific to them and then a number of relationships to other objects within the database. Technologies relate to patents. Patents relate to agreements. Agreement relate to companies. You get the idea. When I add in the idea of managing the licensing process, it becomes clear that seeing these relationships in a broader sense could be useful.

There is a lot of research going on at the University of Illinois in the computer science field, and so I started to do some research into relational data visualization tools that might help us with at least this aspect of the project. The Automated Learning Group (ALG) at NCSA has at least a couple different tools for business intelligence. The Text to Knowledge (T2K) toolset is probably the most interesting and may be able to do exactly one of the things I am thinking.

By showing technologies, patents, agreements, companies, and contacts in clusters, it may be possible to then quickly view related information and get a sense of the bigger picture. If technologies can be navigated based on keywords, it may be possible to link technologies to companies. The user can click on a cluster to center on that cluster or click on a specific item to view the data focused on that item. In this way, the user can quickly navigate items to see the relationships that exist and are not necessarily apparent or obvious by just viewing the textual data itself. This graph shows a little of what I could see as a potential first step in visualizing a set of related data.

The difficulty with T2K is that is a pretty low level tool, and I am sure there has to be something out there to do closer to what I want. During the next week, I am going to be diving into the subject of data visualization more. Hopefully there are some people around campus who do more database work than I do that have used a good product or are at least familiar with the products in this space.