37. An article of manufacture comprising a machine-readable storage medium with instruction code stored in the medium, said instruction code, when executed by a data processing system comprising a processor, causes the processor to perform the following steps to identify products potentially infringing a patent: receiving an identifier of the patent; retrieving text of the patent; parsing the text of the patent to identify claims section of the text of the patent; parsing the claims section to identify one or more individual claims of the patent; parsing the individual claims of the patent to identify one or more independent claims of the patent, the one or more independent claims comprising a first independent claim; identifying a preamble of the first independent claim; identifying one or more limitations of the first independent claim; identifying one or more key terms for each limitation of the one or more limitations; formulating at least one query to search for data items that include the key terms of the one or more limitations of the first independent claim; launching the at least one query; receiving search results responsive to the at least one query; and reviewing the search results of the query; wherein the code causes the processor, in the course of performing the step of identifying one or more key terms, to perform steps comprising: for each word of a plurality of words in the one or more limitations, calculating a ratio of (1) frequency of occurrence within the text of the patent of said each word to (2) frequency of occurrence of said each word in a neutral text not related to the patent or to technology of the patent, thereby obtaining a plurality of ratios, each ratio of the plurality of ratios corresponding to a different said each word; comparing each ratio of the plurality of ratios to a first predetermined parameter to obtain a plurality of key terms, a key term being a word of the plurality of words corresponding to a ratio of the plurality of ratios that exceeds the first predetermined parameter.
37. An article of manufacture comprising a machine-readable storage medium with instruction code stored in the medium, said instruction code, when executed by a data processing system comprising a processor, causes the processor to perform the following steps to identify products potentially infringing a patent: receiving an identifier of the patent; retrieving text of the patent; parsing the text of the patent to identify claims section of the text of the patent; parsing the claims section to identify one or more individual claims of the patent; parsing the individual claims of the patent to identify one or more independent claims of the patent, the one or more independent claims comprising a first independent claim; identifying a preamble of the first independent claim; identifying one or more limitations of the first independent claim; identifying one or more key terms for each limitation of the one or more limitations; formulating at least one query to search for data items that include the key terms of the one or more limitations of the first independent claim; launching the at least one query; receiving search results responsive to the at least one query; and reviewing the search results of the query; wherein the code causes the processor, in the course of performing the step of identifying one or more key terms, to perform steps comprising: for each word of a plurality of words in the one or more limitations, calculating a ratio of (1) frequency of occurrence within the text of the patent of said each word to (2) frequency of occurrence of said each word in a neutral text not related to the patent or to technology of the patent, thereby obtaining a plurality of ratios, each ratio of the plurality of ratios corresponding to a different said each word; comparing each ratio of the plurality of ratios to a first predetermined parameter to obtain a plurality of key terms, a key term being a word of the plurality of words corresponding to a ratio of the plurality of ratios that exceeds the first predetermined parameter. 40. The article of manufacture of claim 37 , wherein the code further causes the processor to perform the step of selecting synonyms of the key terms, and wherein the code causes the processor, in the course performing the step of formulating at least one query, to perform the step of formulating a first query to search for data items that include the key terms of the one or more limitations of the first independent claim and the synonyms of the key terms.