While we do not sell products or services in a traditional sense, my departments still need to be able to manage contacts and lead information to go from marketing a technology to licensing it. While having a customer relationship management (CRM) tool gives a broad sense of a solution, figuring out the details of what to implement is a challenge. A lot of our data is very simple in a sense that records have a number of fields specific to them and then a number of relationships to other objects within the database. Technologies relate to patents. Patents relate to agreements. Agreement relate to companies. You get the idea. When I add in the idea of managing the licensing process, it becomes clear that seeing these relationships in a broader sense could be useful.

There is a lot of research going on at the University of Illinois in the computer science field, and so I started to do some research into relational data visualization tools that might help us with at least this aspect of the project. The Automated Learning Group (ALG) at NCSA has at least a couple different tools for business intelligence. The Text to Knowledge (T2K) toolset is probably the most interesting and may be able to do exactly one of the things I am thinking.