Eric, Some more comments on the use cases, and these apply generally to multiple use cases. Claims can be amended in response to each office action by the USPTO (with some minor exceptions that are not relevant for our purposes). When the claims are amended, what was once relevant prior art, may no longer be considered relevant prior art. So we are going to want some way to capture the rating of a particular reference in response to which set of claims, the original set of claims, the current set of claims, or some set of claims in between. Typically, someone who is providing a prior art reference will be providing that reference for the current set of claims (as the previous claims before the most recent amendments are no longer relevant). However, if you are trying to combine the rating for a current reference with a rating for a reference someone else submitted a year or two ago, against a set of claims before it was amended, you begin to run into the problem of how to combine the ratings/votes. Another issue is that some of the use cases seem to assume that the patent application will eventually end, and that the patent examiner (or date entry clerk) will then enter a rating or vote for how useful the prior art references were. If the references were against the original claims, but the claims have been modified many times, then the references may no longer be useful and may get a vote/rating that is lower than it ought to be, since the prior art references may have forced the claims to be amended in the first place. I recommend collecting votes/ratings after each USPTO office action instead of at the end of the application (since no one knows when a patent application will actually end, it could be ten years). Tom
