Appeal No. 2004-0963
Application No. 09/384,088
and 40-43 under 35 U.S.C. § 103 in light of the collective teachings and
showing of Tateno, Halstead and Marshall, we must reverse this rejection
too. The examiner’s positions focus upon the abstract and certain
teachings at pages 14, 16 and 17 of Marshall and Figures 2 and 4 thereof.
Although there are significant teachings of Marshall relating to a character
string being made up of separately discernible substrings or patterns, the
matching operations using masks focus upon the patterns as comprising
more than one character. We recognize that there is a general teaching of
a character pattern comprising at least one character, but the reference
does not really develop this in such a manner as to lead us to understand
the manner in which Tateno and Halstead could be combined with this
reference to operate upon individual characters of a search string as
claimed. The examiner’s rationale of combinability of the teachings of
Marshall to those of Tateno and Halstead focuses upon the bitmask feature
discussed in this reference in a weakly developed manner in the answer.
Additionally, the apparent ability of Marshal to operate upon character
patterns of at least one character leads us to merely speculate as to how
that would have been applicable to the combined teachings of Tateno and
-8-
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007