Appeal No. 2006-0567
Application 09/938,256
of the principal Brief on appeal are unpersuasive of patent-
ability of all dependent claims. These positions amount to only
general assertions with respect to Zhu and Kagami. There are no
specific arguments here, let alone even a recognition as to what
the examiner considers in Zhu and Kagami to meet the respective
requirements of each of the noted dependent claims. Therefore,
on the basis of the weight of the arguments and evidence before
us as between appellants and the examiner as to all dependent
claims on appeal, the examiner’s position is clearly persuasive
of unpatentability.
We turn now to the rejection of claims 1 and 3 through
27 under 35 U.S.C. § 102 over Kagami alone. Before we address
the merits of this rejection, we note that representative
independent claim 1 in its preamble merely recites a method for
facilitating image retrieval. This image retrieval is not
positively recited in the body of the claim but is merely implied
to the reader from the use of the language “the user wishes to
retrieve” in the first stated clause of this claim. Addition-
ally, there is no actual statement of a retrieval of information
based upon the presentation of explicit questions to the user and
the user’s responses even at the end of the claim where at least
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