Appeal No. 2002-0799
Application No. 08/947,435
examiner’s rationale does not begin to answer the question as to why the artisan would
have found the totality of these steps to have been obvious, even though the prior art
did not suggest the claimed method and even though it may have been known to store
attributes of a data structure in memory.
In an attempt to further describe his/her position, the examiner urges that the
“ObjectMan” disclosure of Zarmer, at column 11, lines 13-37, and column 12, lines 10-
34, somehow suggests the claimed “automatically extracting of attribute data from the
document...” We agree with appellants that “ObjectMan” may provide various services
for persistent objects, or objects which are saved in a database, wherein such services
may include automatic retrieval of an object, automatic deletion of an object from
memory, etc., but there is no suggestion therein of the steps of automatically extracting
attribute data from an imported electronic document, generating a separate data
structure, in which the extracted attribute data is stored and maintained in memory
separate from the imported document, and linking the imported document to an
electronic folder if the attribute data contained in the data structure matches a set of
predefined criteria associated with the electronic folder.
The examiner explains that the folders in Zarmer are object classes (column 23,
lines 39-57) and “it is possible to designate the attributes of a method that instantiates a
7
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007