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Should Salesforce's Tableau Be Granted a Patent On 'Visualizing Hierarchical Data'? 22

Posted by EditorDavid from the diagramming-data dept.
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp says America's Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has granted a patent to Tableau (Salesforce's visual analytics platform) — for a patent covering "Data Processing For Visualizing Hierarchical Data": "A provided data model may include a tree specification that declares parent-child relationships between objects in the data model. In response to a query associated with objects in the data model: employing the parent-child relationships to determine a tree that includes parent objects and child objects from the objects based on the parent-child relationships; determining a root object based on the query and the tree; traversing the tree from the root object to visit the child objects in the tree; determining partial results based on characteristics of the visited child objects such that the partial results are stored in an intermediate table; and providing a response to the query that includes values based on the intermediate table and the partial results."

A set of 15 simple drawings is provided to support the legal and tech gobbledygook of the invention claims. A person can have a manager, Tableau explains in Figures 5-6 of its accompanying drawings, and that manager can also manage and be managed by other people. Not only that, Tableau illustrates in Figures 7-10 that computers can be used to count how many people report to a manager. How does this magic work, you ask? Well, you "generate [a] tree" [Fig. 13] and "traverse a tree" [Fig. 15], Tableau explains. But wait, there's more — you can also display the people who report to a manager in multi-level or nested pie charts (aka Sunburst charts), Tableau demonstrates in Fig. 11.

Interestingly, Tableau released a "pre-Beta" Sunburst chart type in late April 2023 but yanked it at the end of June 2023 (others have long-supported Sunburst charts, including Plotly). So, do you think Tableau should be awarded a patent in 2025 on a concept that has roots in circa-1921 Sunburst charts and tree algorithms taught to first-year CS students in circa-1975 Data Structures courses?

Should Salesforce's Tableau Be Granted a Patent On 'Visualizing Hierarchical Data'? More | Reply

Should Salesforce's Tableau Be Granted a Patent On 'Visualizing Hierarchical Data'?

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  • or is that just when someone sues over it ?

  • No (Score:2)

    by OrangAsm ( 678078 )
    See subject

  • Our patent system is broken beyond repair, you shouldn't be able to patent anything short of revolutionary. The answer is NO and Tableau is a cancer.

    • You can't really decide the bare like that. Instead remove the problem of corporation yielding a way too powerfull arsenal of patents: Patents can only be owned by an entity owning that single patent, using it to gain as many royalties as possible, fairly for all actors. If a company gets a patent they have to establish a separate company handling it, and themselves pay royalties to that company. They can't control that company and that way use the granted, exclusively rights to extent their monopoly, but i
  • Without knowing the claims (at the very least), only dumb people can tell whether the patent should've been awarded...
    • https://patents.google.com/pat... [google.com] It's above my pay grade, but seems to be a UI patent? A system designed to render a collapsable tree on a server and present it to the user's computing device which might be VR with Haptics.
    • PDF version [jumpshare.com]. Their diagrams of a computer are outdated, including BIOS.

      The claims are extremely detailed, which is what I would do if I were required to get a patent for work: make it so detailed that their is no prior art, and no one will likely ever do the same configuration again.
  • I cannot think of a better application for Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.

  • So, do you think Tableau should be awarded a patent in 2025 on a concept that has roots in circa-1921 Sunburst charts and tree algorithms taught to first-year CS students in circa-1975 Data Structures courses?

    It's likely Tableau's founders learned this stuff when they were taking their CS intro courses at Stanford [wikipedia.org] in the first place.

  • 1. Antiquity and the Middle Ages – Early Outlines

    • Aristotle (4th c. BCE): Aristotle’s logical works (the Categories, Topics, Posterior Analytics) introduced hierarchical classification of concepts (e.g., genus species subspecies). These were not indented trees in the modern typographic sense, but were often rendered in later commentaries as branching diagrams or stepwise lists.
    • Porphyry’s Isagoge (3rd c. CE): Introduced the “Tree of Porphyry” (Arbor Porphyriana), a famous

  • There is obviously prior art, so it's not patentable. Since we are seeing more and more of these malicious attempts to patent common practices, I would propose that the patent authority can issue penalties for it. Like, let them issue a fine up to 5 percent of the business' turnover of something for really egregious behaviour like this. Make them feel it.

    As it is now, there is no reason not to try, which is kinda ridiculous.

  • No. (Score:2)

    by msauve ( 701917 )
    There should be no software patents.
  • Patent Application: Revolutionary Bread Browning Solution (a.k.a. Toast)

    Abstract: This groundbreaking invention tackles the age-old crisis of bread being too soft, too edible, and frankly too boring. By blasting bread with weaponized levels of heat until it cries out in crispy anguish, this system produces what humanity calls "toast." Said toast can then be smeared with salted fats, sticky fruits, or whichever condiment is least expired in one’s fridge. The invention supersedes all prior methods o

  • I worked for this one company for 13 years and started from the ground up. Later on I was asked to be a part of 3 teams that were to compete in an internal design contest for visualizing hierarchical data. As a part of this internal development team our goal was to reduce the labor needed in the process by adding a visual component to the correlations. This allowed an anyone to quickly investigate an item further to verify the data points accuracy. It was simple and elegant, I was so proud of my design. In

  • It's called an "org chart."

    Oh wait this is an org chart "with a computer."

    What am I missing here?

  • â¦On a computer

    Patent granted.

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