Appeal No. 2000-1973
Application 08/890,906
. . . said first method program being included in said first
authorized method programs." The examiner finds that Kelly does
not explicitly disclose implementation of "authorized method
programs, but that this would have been obvious over Endicott.
Appellants argue that the principal disagreement regarding
the patentability of the claimed subject matter involves the
proper interpretation of the term encapsulation (Br5). It is
argued that the well known meaning of the term is "tight coupling
of an object's data with an object's methods" (Br5), while the
examiner has defined encapsulation as "Grouping the functions
that operate on a data structure with its representation . . ."
(R2). Nevertheless, appellants state that the examiner's
definition is in keeping with the disclosed invention (Br6).
We find no discrepancy between the Object Oriented
Programming (OOP) definition employed by the examiner and the
statement in the specification that "[m]ethods and object data
are said to be 'encapsulated' in the object" (spec. at 2). That
is, "encapsulation" in the OOP context is related to the concept
of "modularity" and encapsulation is broadly the creation of
self-sufficient modules (objects) that contain the data and the
processing (data structure and functions that manipulate that
data). "Encapsulation" can also refer to "data hiding," where
the object has an interface part and an implementation part, and
the interface part is the only visible part of the object; e.g.,
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