National Day of Civic Hacking 2014
Blog by Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Deputy Director of the USPTO Michelle K. Lee
The second annual National Day of Civic Hacking will take place on May 31 - June 1, 2014, in communities around the world. This event brings together technologists, social activists, entrepreneurs and others to grow communities of innovation across the nation. As an agency that helps nurture and protect innovation, we are pleased to be joining this effort for the second year in a row.
Last year, the USPTO challenged civic hackers to use the trademark dataset and other open data sources to develop applications that identified federally registered trademarks that comprise an entity’s portfolio or brand, or are used on specific products, in designated industries, or in geographical areas. Citizens answered the challenge by developing innovative applications that searched for trademarks by dominant color, "translated" words based on their relationship to concepts in the trademark data, and a trademark classifier that used machine-learning to extract key concepts and statistically important phrases.
The USPTO currently makes patent and trademark public data available in bulk form, which can be used to load into databases or other analytical tools for research and analysis and provides an application programming interface (API) for the Trademark Official Gazette. We are working to provide more APIs in the near future to enable better access to data at the USPTO.
This year, we are challenging National Day of Civic Hacking participants to use the patent and trademark datasets and other open data sources to develop innovative applications that can be used on mobile devices including smartphones and tablets. Based on feedback from our recent Crowdsourcing Prior Art roundtable, one potential area of interest is an application that would allow citizens to subscribe to alerts when applications are published that meet user specified criteria such as inventor, assignee, classification information, and/or keywords in the claims. It would be wonderful to have an application developed to achieve this.
I urge all those looking for a unique way to volunteer in your community through technology to consider participating in the National Day of Civic Hacking. You can learn more at hackforchange.org or read our specific patent challenge or trademark challenge.
Posted at 12:25PM May 27, 2014 in USPTO |