Technology Readiness Tracker

The goal of this project is to create a tool to give information about the maturity of a technology. In short, it should be able to help answer the question "Is this technology ready?" More specifically, a user should be able to use this tool to see if a technology is mature enough to enter the market, or if a technology has been sufficiently developed to the point where a competitor is likely to be ready to launch a product.

Currently, this question is extremely difficult and time consuming to answer. We hope to simplify the process by analyzing trends in existing technologies, and providing ways to search and display them.

Background:
The idea for this project originally came from a method of classifying technologies created by NASA called Technology Readiness Levels. These levels track the progression of a technology all the way from its initial conception, to it being actively and successfully used. This is useful because it provides an indication as to how mature a technology is, and if has developed to the point where it is reliable enough to be used in a project.

The original goal of this project was to automate the mapping of a given technology to its readiness level, and predict when it would advance to the next levels. Predicting this would have a multitude of uses, for example, it could give an indication of whether a newly developed technology would be worthwhile to license. Since then, the goals of our project have shifted to what is described below.

Data Sets
To meet our specifications, we plan to look at the following types of data: To start out, we are focusing on patent data.
 * 1) Patent data (Either from the United States, or from Europe)
 * 2) Scholarly articles
 * 3) Web searches

As this project is largely data based, finding adequate data sources is extremely important. When evaluating potential data sources, we looked at the following criteria:
 * 1) Availability: How easy is this data source to access? Do we need specialized tools? Can it be queried without downloading the entirety of the data set?
 * 2) Completeness: How complete is this data source? Is it up to date? Does it contain all the information we would need for the type of data?
 * 3) Compatibility: How easy would this data source be to combine data from this source with other types of data?

Patent data
Based on the above analysis, we have decided to use the USPTO API as the source of all our patent data.