Technology Readiness Tracker

The goal of this project is to create a tool that can be used as a starting point when doing research on the maturity of a technology. This tool will provide ways to search for and analyze trends in technology and help provide a better picture about the current state of a given technology.

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.

Technology Choices

 * Python- a general purpose programming language that we picked to use as the main programing language for our project. We decided this because:
 * All of the team members in our project have experience with Python
 * Python has many great data processing libraries that will be useful for achieving our first requirement (Find trends in dataset).
 * Python code is quick to write, so we can focus on the meat of our project.


 * Web Application (HTML/CSS/Javascript)- Two of our major requirements are Graphing Data, and a User Interface. We decided to develop a web application in order to fulfill these.
 * Interactive visualizations are far easier to create as a web application, then as a desktop application.
 * Web applications are much easier for an end user to use- All they need to do is navigate to a specific page in a web browser.
 * There are many useful Javascript libraries for visualization and user interfaces

Project architecture
This is still undergoing some changes, so we'll update this section later.