Appeal No. 96-3699
Application 08/063,407
problem defined thereby. Rules base 34 is a knowledge base and engine 32 is the problem solver.
Together they operate on an incorrect input and convert it to a sequence of commands and/or actions
which do what the system guesses the incorrect input is attempting to do, or take a goal and generate a
sequence of commands and/or actions which will achieve the goal. The commands and/or actions are
presented to the user as suggestions. Generator 48 uses trace 46 to search through templates 50 and
produces complementary explanations 56 of why suggestions 54 were made and explanations 58 of
how such suggestions work.
In Figure 2A, Bourne discloses a hierarchical arrangement of workspaces which can perform
useful tasks. The workspaces can be in a single computer or separate computers.
The Rejection under 35 U.S.C. §103
It is the examiner’s position that Prager teaches all the limitations of the claims with the
exception that Prager does not teach the subject matter of paragraph (f), the step of determining the
hierarchical level of the data entered in a data base. Bourne is asserted to teach the exception, and the
examiner contends that it would have been obvious for one of ordinary skill in the art at the time the
invention was made to combine Prager’s method for solving problems with Bourne’s hierarchical
arrangement in order to allow Prager’s method to find words in a different database at the same level,
thus allowing Prager’s method to solve problems more efficiently (faster).
Opinion
4
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Last modified: November 3, 2007