Appeal No. 1998-0630
Application 08/231,655
systems, and more particularly to a system and method for ranking and displaying to a user the
relevance of information which is accessed. As indicated in the specification (page 2), prior art systems
are known to rank information in order of relevance to a particular user based on content. Appellants
recognized that the prior art suffered from the problem that known information relevance predicting
techniques failed to utilize community feedback as a factor in making a prediction/ranking of relevance
of information (specification, page 3). To overcome this problem, appellants provide a system and
method for obtaining feedback information provided by users when an item of information is retrieved,
thereby providing user correlation data which can be used along with content data to rank the item of
information in order of relevance (specification, page 4).
As further discussed, infra, we find that the examiner has failed to make out a prima facie case
of obviousness with respect to claims 1 to 30 on appeal.
Representative independent claim 1 is reproduced below:
1. In a computerized information access system, a method for presenting items of information
to users, comprising the steps of:
a) storing user profiles for users having access to the system, where each user profile is based,
at least in part, on the attributes of information the user finds to be of interest;
b) determining an attribute-based relevance factor for an item of information which is indicative
of the degree to which an attribute of that item of information matches the profile for a particular user;
c) determining a measure of correlation between the particular user’s interests and those of
other users who have accessed said item of information;
2
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