Appeal No. 1998-0630
Application 08/231,655
and the prior art, and explaining how and why the claims are unpatentable over the pior art.
Regarding claims 1, 14, and 28 for example, the examiner (Answer, page 2) only states that
Scannell teaches a computerized access system having a storage means and a rule test unit. We agree
with appellants (Brief, page 9) that the examiner has failed to adequately set forth where in Scannell, or
the other applied references, the prior art taught or would have suggested the means for determining a
correlation between the interests of a particular user and other users or the means for combining,
ranking, or predicting based on the two factors - the relevance factor and the correlation factor. The
examiner has nowhere provided a statement adequeately addressing the underlying factual inquiries
including: (1) the scope and content of the prior art; (2) the level of ordinary skill in the prior art; and (3)
the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art. Accordingly, we cannot sustain the
rejection of claims 1 to 30 under 35 U.S.C. § 103.
We agree with appellants (Brief, page 8) that even if there were some plausible reason for
combining the applied references, their combined teachings would not have suggested the claimed
subject matter of claims 1 to 30 on appeal, including the feature of ranking information based on a
relevance factor and a correlation factor which represents a correlation between a given user’s interests
and the interests of other users who have accessed the same information. We find that the examiner, by
pointing only to the abstract of Yourick, has not adequately shown that Yourick teaches the feature
required by claim 1 of "determining a measure of correlation" between a particular user’s interests and
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