Appeal No. 1999-0855
Application No. 08/730,468
USPQ2d
1443, 1444 (Fed. Cir. 1992).
With respect to independent claims 17 and 21, the
Examiner, as the basis for the obviousness rejection, proposes
to modify the disclosure of APA. According to the Examiner,
APA discloses the claimed invention except for the feature of
building the sort tree only large enough to hold the data
records entered (page 3 of the Office action mailed February
28, 1997, Paper No. 4). To address this deficiency, the
Examiner turns to the Amsbury reference, which describes a
balancing technique for a static BST (binary sort tree), and
asserts the obviousness to the skilled artisan of constructing
a tournament tree of the required size
“ . . . because otherwise the unused nodes waste volatile
memory space.” (Id.).
After reviewing Appellant’s arguments in response, we are
in general agreement with Appellant that the Examiner has not
established a prima facie case of obviousness since proper
motivation for making the proposed combination has not been
established. In our view, the Amsbury reference provides
nothing more than a suggestion to balance sort trees to ensure
7
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007