A 3D treemap approach for analyzing the classificatory distribution in patent portfolios

Due to the complexity of the patent domain and the huge amount of data, advanced interactive visual techniques are needed to support the analysis of large patent collections and portfolios. In this paper we present a new approach for visualizing the classificatory distribution of patent collections among the International Patent Classification (IPC) - todaypsilas most important internationally agreed patent classification system with about 70.000 categories. Our approach is based on an interactive three-dimensional treemap overlaid with adjacency edge bundles.