Appeal No. 96-1898
Application No. 07/921,826
contends that Ferrer might not explicitly teach the steps of
defining and storing physical storage information for each of
the data objects but that it was well known in the computer
arts that such definition and storage of physical storage
information was always required in order to subsequently
retrieve the stored information.
The examiner also admits that Ferrer did not teach the
claimed step of “maintaining a method entity...” but the
examiner relies on Joseph’s teaching of an entity-relationship
in Figure 4 therein for providing for this deficiency in
Ferrer, contending that the combination would have been
obvious because of the benefit to Ferrer gained from providing
this benefit of the “well-known feature of polymorphism”
[principal answer - pages 8-9].
For his part, appellant contends that Ferrer does not
teach the claimed step of storing data objects, relationships
and physical storage information “as a network” [reply brief -
page 5, emphasis in the original]. We disagree. The
information at the nodes, along with the relationships between
the nodes, represented by arrows, in Ferrer clearly comprise a
“network,” as broadly claimed. When this information is
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