Research and higher education
Preserving the meaning of research and licensing data
Reverse engineering and migration preparation for intellectual property records, inventor relationships, licensing information, and financial allocations.
Steven Wittek’s prior employment and consulting experience · Organization anonymized
The work
University technology-transfer teams manage the relationships between research discoveries, inventors, licensing activity, and the allocation of financial returns. Moving that information requires more than copying tables: the receiving system needs to understand which records belong together and what the relationships mean.
A major public research university needed to move intellectual property information from a custom FileMaker application into Wellspring IP. The legacy system contained incomplete documentation, application-specific visual indicators, and financial relationships that were not immediately clear from the exported data.
I owned the technical extraction, transformation, SQL Server staging, and delivery work. I investigated the legacy structures and business rules, translated application-specific meanings into explicit data mappings, and prepared the relationships between intellectual property records, inventors, participating entities, and financial allocations.
The work also required dealing with older database connectivity and ODBC compatibility constraints. I used SQL Server as an intermediate environment to organize and transform the information, then prepared a compatible database backup for the receiving software vendor. Wellspring performed the final import into its hosted application.
My deliverable was structured, vendor-ready migration data with the relationships needed to represent the original business information. The engineering effort made the legacy application understandable enough to support its replacement.
Engineering outcome
Delivered a transformed SQL Server dataset and vendor-compatible backup for the receiving platform, covering research-IP relationships and financial allocations.