Appeal No. 1997-1012 Application No. 08/115,937 limitation and directs our attention to pages 487 and 488 of Strong for a teaching of this limitation. (See answer at page 15.) Appellants argue that “Strong et al. do not disclose a thesaurus as claimed here. Strong et al. employ a concept-based hierarchical structure (i.e., facets and sub-facets). With regard to independent claim 1, Strong et al. do not expand the list of search descriptors, but rather only allow the user to navigate down the hierarchical tree from broad to narrow facets.” (See brief at page 5.) We agree with appellants. The three brief quotations of the text of the Strong reference cited by the Examiner do not expressly teach that the thesaurus is used in a manner to function as a means to “expand” the list of search descriptors. Furthermore, the Examiner has not provided a convincing line of reasoning why the skilled artisan would have been motivated to “expand” the list of search descriptors using a thesaurus means in view of the lack of an express teaching in any of the references applied against the claims. Appellants further argue that Kawai, Strong and Cannon “all base their search strategies on either menus or hierarchies of limited, predetermined 2 terms.” (See brief at page 6.) We agree with appellants. Therefore, we will not sustain the rejection of claims 1, 3, 4, 8, 11, 13, 14, 18, 21-22, 24 and 28 under 35 U.S.C. § 103. While we do not find that Strong teaches the use of a thesaurus to expand the list of search2 descriptors, we note that Reed et al. U.S. Patent 5,241,671 at col. 3-4 and IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin, Vol. 30, No. 12, pp. 117-118, May 1988 teach and suggest the use of a thesaurus in the generation or modification of data base search queries. We make no finding beyond directing attention thereto. 4Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 NextLast modified: November 3, 2007