Need to do research on patents from all the web sites where I can find them (USPTO, CIPO etc.) and I need to automate this task as much as I can. I have no idea what programming languages/tools to use and how to use them.
My first idea would be to write a script/program that would go through each tab (in Chrome?) that contains a multi-page PDF file containing the patent (50 tabs opened in one pass), save the PDF file opened in that tab on the hard drive (create a name for the PDF file based on system time stamp), close the web browser tab after that and move on to the next tab until all files are saved and all tabs are closed.I need to go through approximately 200,000 patents in my first leg, if I process manually 300 patens a day, it would take me approximately two years -- I need to automate any aspect of it if I am to do it in a few months [this is just an explanation of the problem I am trying to solve, as a technical context].
What tool would be the best for this type of exercise?
My background in programming is C/C++, shell scripting (DOS and UNIX), MS SQL Server, some VisualBasic, some Java, some HTML and that is about it -- no web browser programming whatsoever.Any indication would be greatly appreciated, I have nothing right now, but I am willing to learn anything from scratch in order to get this done.