Appeal No. 2001-2688
Application No. 08/735,619
Turning to the rejection of claim 24 under 35 U.S.C. § 103
as being unpatentable over Clanton in view of Grossman and
Williams, we fail to find that these claims require the same
limitations as we have pointed out above. In particular, claim
24 recites
[a] method of selecting a physical item from a stock of
physical items, such physical item classifiable into
one having at least two categories, comprising:
representing the stock as a geometric object
corresponding to a virtual space having logical
coordinates in at least two dimensions, where each
physical item is assigned to a point on the logical
coordinates in accordance to its categories.
We fail to find that Appellants' above arguments as to claim 24
apply because the claim is not directed to a database in a
computer system. Appellants further argue on pages 8 and 9 of
the brief that the references fail to teach or suggest (1) items
classifiable in two categories; (2) a geometric object
corresponding to a virtual space having logical coordinates used
to represent items in a database; or (3) the assignment of the
items to point on the logical coordinates based on the
classifications of the items and displaying them accordingly. As
pointed out above, we fail to find that claim 24 requires the
limitation of a database. The claim clearly recites the term
"stock" which is much broader than a database. We find that
1313
Page: Previous 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007