Appeal No. 2006-1342
Application No. 09/488,471
(p. 11-12) of the specification, regarding the submission of “new rating information” which will
be “integrated with the rating data already stored in the on-line ranking repository...for use in
subsequent searches” also points to appellant being in possession, at the time of filing the instant
application, of updating cumulative business satisfaction ratings and re-indexing such ratings.
Accordingly, we agree with appellant that there is adequate support for the instant
claimed subject matter, within the meaning of 35 U.S.C. §112, first paragraph, and we will not
sustain the rejection of claims 1, 9, 17, and 25 under 35 U.S.C. §112, first paragraph.
We turn now to the rejection of the independent claims under 35 U.S.C. §103.
It is the examiner’s position (answer-pages 4-8) that BizRate discloses the claimed
subject matter but for the step of indexing the rating data, storing the rating data indexed by the
off-line ranking system, and updating cumulative business satisfaction ratings from the users’
off-line ranking system, or feedback automatically causing the off-line ranking system to re-
index the rating data and further cause the result sorter to generate ranked matches based on the
re-indexed rating data. However, contends the examiner, Peters provides for this deficiency at
column 2, line 45 - column 3, line 16, column 4, lines 28-30, column 19, lines 46-57, column 21,
line 65 - column 22, line 13, column 30, lines 12-19, and column 26, lines 43-50 (see answer-
pages 7-8).
7
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