Appeal No. 2000-2012
Application No. 08/937,354
14. Therefore, we will not sustain the rejection of independent claim 14 since the
examiner has not established a prima facie case of anticipation.
With respect to independent claim 15, the examiner maintains that Abraham at
col. 8, lines 5-33 and col. 11, lines 7-22 teaches the step of determining whether the
second analysis can be synthesized as a combination of the first result and a third
result. (See answer at page 5.) We disagree with the examiner and find that Abraham
does not explicitly or inherently teach this determination step. While Abraham teaches
the use of a sequential data set and queries with persistent stream and that the results
of a query may be used more that once at col. 12, Abraham does not disclose what or
how the results will be used in combination with any other data or subsequent queries
such that a step of determining if the second analysis requires the performance of the
first analysis.1 Therefore, we will not sustain the rejection of independent claim 15 and
its dependent claims 16-19 since the examiner has not established a prima facie case
of anticipation.
With respect to independent claims 20, 30, and 31, appellants argue that the
examiner has lost the distinction between method and apparatus claims and that the
examiner has not applied Abraham against the claims. (See brief at page 14.) We
1 We note that we are not finding that a user may not perform this step, but only that Abraham
does not teach that the system or a user performs a step of determining if the second analysis requires
the performance of the first analysis.
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