referencedby.rb is a simple Ruby application which acquires a list of patent numbers which are referencing a given patent.

The application's purpose is to:

• Verify accuracy of ongoing updates for referenced by patent table resulting from SQL query.
• Provide a snapshot of a selection of patent web pages displayed on both Google and USPTO for providing test data and long term monitoring of changes in displayed data.

spec: manual counts to match. separate test fixtures from

The patent web pages are stored in the ./data directory, sorted according to provenance.

• USPTO
• Google

Consider making output as report? The idea is making it super easy to check results visually.

• Wrap the kernel in a class, initialize with desired patent number, hold xpath parsed results in attr_accessible :patents.

Most recently verified references can be found at https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/fidownloads/reffedby.csv.zip

Most recent references (unverified) can be found at https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/fidownloads/citations_mar262013.csv.zip

citations_mar262013.csv is a table of forward citations. The first column is a patent number, the second column is a patent that it references.