Appeal No. 96-1349
Application 08/002,168
data structure comparison mechanism. While this result indicated
by the examiner is undoubtedly correct, it is not a valid basis
for rejection of a claim. It explains more why appellant wishes
to patent such a process. Since most inventions are designed to
improve efficiency, performance or reliability, the examiner’s
analysis would make it very difficult to patent anything.
Our analysis of independent claims 1-3 and our review of
the evidence supplied by the examiner in support of the rejection
indicate that the examiner has failed to set forth a prima facie
case of obviousness. Each of the independent claims recites
specific details of a template data structure and a specific
procedure for creating the normalized data structure. Although
the creation of a normalized data structure may be present in
Davidson, there is no description in Davidson of using a template
data structure having the claimed details or of using a bitwise
AND operation in the generation of the normalized data structure
as claimed. We are unable to conclude that the specific steps
for normalizing a data structure as recited in the claims is
suggested by Davidson even if similar results are achieved.
The examiner has not considered the specific recitations
of the independent claims, but instead, has equated the overall
method to a concept and argued that the concept was well known
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