Patent ID: 8688732

Claim:
A system for mining research data, comprising: a data storage system that stores a plurality of persistent research notes, wherein individual persistent research notes contain data regarding a plurality of similar items from an electronic catalog of items, said data comprising: item data reflective of a plurality of compared catalog items from said electronic catalog; factor data reflective of at least one factor by which said compared catalog items are compared; comparative data, at least some of said comparative data comprising text provided by an author and corresponding to one of said compared catalog items and one of said factors, so that the comparative data describes the author's comparison of said compared catalog item according to said factor; priority data reflective of a user-specified priority of at least one of said factors, so that factors which are considered of higher priority can be distinguished from factors considered of lower priority; and a data mining system operative to analyze, on an aggregated basis, said item data, factor data, and priority data of a plurality of research notes authored by a plurality of users in order to generate priority frequency data for a plurality of factors for a given compared catalog item, said priority frequency data at least approximately indicating, for an item-factor pair composed of a catalog item and a factor, an importance of the factor relative to other factors based on author preferences in research note comparisons; said data mining system comprising one or more physical servers.