Appeal No. 1997-0921
Application 08/038,577
in method claim 1 on appeal except for the last or generating clause. In any case, all
claims on appeal relate the body of the claim to the preamble. That is to say, the plurality
of process steps to form a sequence of steps in the preamble of each of the three
independent claims on appeal directly are related to and recited in the body of the claims
in more specific manners in the context of a database and the sequencing of the steps
associated therewith to generate the process steps ultimately "to operate a machine" as
set forth in the preamble.
A study of the written specification and the Figures reveals that they are less
integrated and explained as we would prefer to see. What is significant to us, however, is
that the specification is written from the perspective of an artisan as defined earlier at a
relatively high level of understanding or abstraction. This, we believe, the examiner has not
appreciated in reaching the decision to reject the claims on appeal under two bases of 35
U.S.C. § 112. The specification is written from the perspective of an object oriented
database or OODB and from the further perspective of disclosing a generic manner in
which changes to a methodology of sequencing the various steps of manufacturing in
producing a product may be explained. A broadly depicted OODB management system is
shown in Figure 3 where the claimed machine to be controlled and the sequence of steps
listed to control it are shown to be embodied in the machine processor 610 of Figure 4.
With respect to the claimed pointer, it is noted originally at page 3 of the specification that
an object may comprise only a set of pointers to data in the context of an OODB; it is also
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