Example Queries from the MV:Biofuels Vaim

• "Vaim Faqs." Steve Kimbrough, May 10, 2006. PDF
• "Vaim Design Faqs." Steve Kimbrough, draft July 9, 2006. PDF
• "On Deriving Indicators from Texts", draft paper by Kimbrough, Lee, and Oktem. PDF
• "Value-Add Information Mashes (Vaims): Concepts, technologies, prospects." Foils for talk presented at CSM'06 - 20th Workshop on Methodologies and Tools for Complex System Modeling and Integrated Policy Assessment, held at IIASA (Laxenburg, Austria) on August 28-30, 2006. PDF

A vaim, and the MV:Biofuels vaim in particular, integrates two main sources of knowledge:

• Text knowledge, manifested as collections of documents

  The present version of the MV:Biofuels vaim integrates US patents (1999-2003) and documents downloaded from Web sites associated with biofuels companies. In the near future we plan to add: SEC filings, news articles, and documents obtained by general Web searches.

• Ontologies

  Are also known as classification systems, categorizations, and so on. In addition to temporal indexing, the MVBiofuels vaim works with an ontology of biofuels organizations (see item 1, below), an ontology of key words and phrases (the 'n-grams', see items 2 and 4, below), and the patent classification system of the USPTO (see item 6, below).

What follows on this page are a series of links for example queries supported by our system, MV:Biofuels, a minimal vaim in the area of biofuels. It is very much a work-in-progress. The queries are live and genuine.

1. Ontology

   Click here.

2. List of Biofuels Organizations and Their URLs

   Click here.

3. List of biofuels n-grams (ontology words and phrases) appearing US patents

   Warning: This query typicaly takes 30 seconds or so to execute.

   The query produces two tables. The first is ordered alphabetically by n-gram. The second is ordered by n-gram counts.

   The patents indexed are the approximately 800,000 US patents issued 1999-2003.

   Click here.

4. Counts by year of patents containing an n-gram
   • "Sustainability" mentions by year in US patents

     Click here.

   • Pick an n-gram from the master list.

     Click here.

5. N-grams appearing in Web sites of biofuels organizations

   Click here.

6. Biofuels organizations with patents
   1. Click here for a count of patents held by biofuels organizations. Warning: Query takes about 30 seconds.

   2. Click here for a list of patents held by biofuels organizations. Warning: Query takes about 30 seconds.

   3. Pick an n-gram from the master list. Click here. Assignees of patents. Warning: Query takes about 30 seconds.

7. Categorizing by the USPTO classification system

   Biodegradable: Click here.

   All n-grams: Click here.

   To pick an n-gram: Click here.

8. Co-occurrence queries

   In patents. To pick an n-gram: Click here. Warning: Query takes 40 seconds or so.

   In biofuels organizations' Web sites. To pick an n-gram: Click here.

9. Queries involving patent bibliographic records (for the 175,071 US patents granted during 2006)

   Click here to see a report on patents matching an n-gram you choose.

   Click here to see a report on patents matching a word or phrase you choose.

   Click here to see a report on the distribution of patents by USPTO class and subclass, matching a word or phrase you choose. (This query takes a bit of time, 5-10 minutes just for 2006 data!. Click here to see a saved report on the query "oils?", which matches to either "oil" or "oils" as whole words.)

   Click here to see the patents matching a search term and a USPTO class of your choosing.

   Click here to see a report on the distribution of patent assignees by US state.