Appeal No. 95-2429
Application No. 07/916,770
from another. We do not agree with this position as broadly
applied by the examiner. The examiner’s position is essentially
the same position adopted by the examiner in In re Lowry, 32 F.3d
1579, 32 USPQ2d 1031 (Fed. Cir. 1994). There, the court
determined that a memory as a structure could be distinguished by
the nature of the data structures which are stored therein. The
court noted that the data structures in Lowry imposed a physical
organization on the data, 32 F.3d 1583, 32 USPQ2d 1034. We are
of the view that the data structures recited in the appealed
claims impose a similar physical constraint on the memory which
distinguishes the claimed memory from a memory which does not
have these specific data structures.
We also note that independent claim 1, for example, also
recites a “means for searching said data structures.” We fail to
see how such a means could be suggested by the prior art unless
the particular data structures themselves were suggested by the
prior art. Thus, we conclude that the specific recitations of
the data structures must be considered in determining whether the
appealed claims are unpatentable over the prior art.
Having made this determination, we observe that the
examiner has argued that hierarchical data structures of a
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