Thanks Joel for your detailed explanation. It was very informative. I have been using routeviews for sometime, but given that I could get this amount of information from other sources, I decided to give this a try.
On another note, do you think there is any value in checking the next hop IP? I have been checking and it looks as if when the IP is in the AS at the head of the AS path, the entry is associated with an iBGP record, right? I just used the ripe stat to map IPs to AS and it always holds when there is an AS for the next hop IP. Thanks again for your input.
