WIPO data on inventor's nationality

A recently published paper by Ernest Miguelez and Carsten Fink exploits a piece of information contained into WIP databases and not yet utilized: inventors' nationality.

The paper (Measuring the International Mobility of Inventors:  A new database?) describes a new database mapping migratory patterns of inventors, extracted from information included in patent applications filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty. and provides a descriptive overview of inventor migration patterns, based on the information contained in the newly constructed database.

The paper may be downloaded here.

You may find the aggregated data here (raw data not avaliable yet)

Mapping ethnicity onto names

OnoMAP is a spin off of University College London that provides, via it's website, a way of classifying people and the places they live, based on our common cultural, ethnic and linguistic roots. 

OnoMAP analyses common patterns of forenames and surnames using a databases of people drawn from 28 countries. The OnoMAP classification covers over 500,000 forenames and 1 million surnames, and most exhibit distinctive geographic patterning.

 Via the website http://www.onomap.org you can make a simple interrogation on one name/surname or you may contact the company for providing full access to the data.