Appeal No. 1998-0933
Application No.08/421,597
microcomputer 20, as are national zip codes.
The examiner’s position with respect to the rejected
claims appears at page 4 of the final rejection.
That position, which is incorporated into the examiner’s
answer, is that,
Although Manduley does not clearly teach the
characters being assigned in the mail piece images
based on statistical relationships in the database,
it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill
in the art that the step of assigning an ordinary
[sic:ordinal] number in Manduley can inherently
include that limitation because this number is
assigned at a comparator which compares the zip code
in the mail piece with the national zip code +4 in
database (col. 4, lines 44-46).
This position is not persuasive because Manduley has
not been shown to teach storing data in a database which
is based on statistical relationships of selected
parameters obtained from mail streams, nor the assigning
of characters in a mail piece image based on the stored
data, and it has not been established wherein there
exists some suggestion or incentive to make the purported
obvious modifications of the prior art. In re Fritch,
972 F.2d 1260, 1266, 23 USPQ2d 1780, 1783-1784 (Fed. Cir.
1992). The examiner’s position that the step of
assigning an ordinal number in Manduley can inherently
include that limitation is unpersuasive because the
examiner has not established inherency. The fact that
the number is assigned at a comparator does not establish
the alleged inherency. Lastly, the fact that the prior
art may be modified to include storing data in a database
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