Patent Citation Analysis Project Upcoming

Hello everyone.

Thought I'd drop a quick post about an upcoming project that I'll be pursuing soon for my "real job". (I an the Systems Manager for the University of Nebraska - Lincoln's Office of Technology Devlepment, which is the office of the University responsible for commercializing all intellectual properties - patents, etc. - generated through University research.)

What I'll be trying to accomplish using Excel and VBA, and specifically using the objHTTP object to return web pages and regular expressions to parse the text results of those pages, is a homemade system for performing patent citation analysis.

Now, if any of you are familiar with this type of analysis, you'll know that there are many commercially available packages out there, including services from MicroPatent (www.micropat.com), that do this sort of thing, but understand that our office will be using such solutions, and what I'm trying to do is extend that built in functionality.

This ought to be quite interesting in the end (to me, at least).

I'll keep you posted.

Excel_Geek