Appeal No. 96-1534
Application 07/888,991
The Section 102 rejection of claims 25-30 is premised on
the position that only one of the steps of the claims needs to be
satisfied for the claim as a whole to be met by Kuechler [answer,
page 14]. As we noted above, this position was staked out before
the claims were amended to read “any one of,” and the examiner
has not addressed the significance of this amendment. Our
interpretation is that the claims require that each of the
substeps be capable of being carried out if the associated
condition is satisfied. The examiner has not identified where in
Kuechler a determination is made in response to a query regarding
the size of the database file and the decision to filter records
whenever the file is below a pre-selected size. Since this step
will take precedence whenever the database file is below a pre-
selected size, an anticipatory reference must disclose this step
as being present. Kuechler does not disclose this step.
Since all the limitations of representative claim 28 are
not fully met by the disclosure of Kuechler, we do not sustain
the rejection of claims 25-30 as anticipated by the disclosure of
Kuechler.
We now consider the rejection of claims 25-30 under 35
U.S.C. § 103 as being unpatentable over the teachings of
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