Appeal No. 96-1898
Application No. 07/921,826
stored for later retrieval and then retrieved, the nodes and
relationships must still be the same as before storage,
containing the same information that made it a “network” in
the first place and, as such, Ferrer does, indeed, broadly
disclose the storage of data objects, relationships and
physical storage information as a network.
Appellant further contends [reply brief - bottom of page
5] that Ferrer and Joseph are not properly combinable since
Ferrer relates to “hypergraphs and hyperedges which are
distinctly different from object oriented databases and
object-oriented programming languages as disclosed by Joseph.
We disagree with this argument also because, as broadly set
forth, the claimed subject matter calls for a method “for
modelling data in an information repository” and does not
appear to be limited to any specific type of system. As such,
both Ferrer and Joseph would be in the general area of data
base management and we find no reason the artisan would not
have been expected to know of each type of system.
Finally, appellant challenges the examiner’s assertion
that the claimed maintaining step is known as “polymorphism”
[reply brief - page 5] and requests the examiner to provide
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