[Savannah-hackers] submission of Patent WIKI site - savannah.nongnu.org

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Carsten Svaneborg <address@hidden> described the package as follows:
License: gpl
Other License: 
Package: Patent WIKI site
System name: ziki
Type: non-GNU

Description:
http://gauss.bacon.su.se is a website currently presenting roughly 23K 
software patents, that has been granted by the European Patent Office (EPO).

The purpose of the site is to present software patents in a easy readable way, 
such that politicians, journalists, SME, and OSS developers can see which 
patents have actually been granted. The purpose of the site is to raise 
awareness about software patent matters, which in turn allows people better to 
influence the political processes, that are currently trying to legalise the 
software patents that EPO has granted.

Some of the features of the site is links in patent documents to
"related" patents, like in a WIKI, and WIKI annotation of patents. Furthermore, 
most of the patents are in the software field, and
all have been granted by the EPO.

Existing patent services such as ep.espacenet.com are targeted for patent 
professionals, not software developers. Hence, it's difficult to find software 
specific patents, and especially those that has been granted, and it takes some 
knowledge to interprete the results.
My scripts are a perl interface to ep.espacenet.com, that can
automate searches, and vetting of patents into granted or applications.

The project consists of the set of scripts (perl & bash) that
generate and maintain the website, as well as the set of scripts
that I have used to generate the database. I also have a satelite
project of modifying spamassassins Baysian classifier to distinguish
between software and non-software patents. The plan is to vet all
patents granted, and thus make a complete and uptoday
database over granted software patents. I'm currently waiting for 
reply from EPO for permission to distribute the patent database
itself.

I have many ideas about how to improve the scripts, the site
and the database. However, I don't have the time for realising
those ideas. I have GPL'ed the scripts, such that people can
improve them, and asked for assistance, and a number of people
are interested in contributing, as a result we need infrastructure
for hosting the project.

Note there is nothing in the code or site that is particular for
European patents, given a database of US software patents, a similar
site could be running within no time.

The relevant source code and database can be downloaded from
http://gauss.bacon.su.se/download

It runs happily on a linux server with requires bash, perl and apache.


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