Appeal No. 2001-2051
Application 08/923,293
ratings of items by other system users (col. 1, lines 53-56).
The items may be any product or service that can be rated by a
user (col. 3, lines 24-27). The improvement involves determining
a similarity in preference of the user as compared to other
users, which is used to determine a subgroup of users having
preferences similar to the first user, and the ratings of the
subgroup of users are then used to recommend an item to the first
user (abstract; col. 6, lines 29-35). In order to determine a
similarity value, the first user and other user must have ratings
in the database for at least one common item (col. 6, lines 25-27
& 38-41). The users in Robinson are required to actively
participate by entering their subjective ratings of items in the
group, in contrast to the disclosed invention which uses previous
customer activity history to reduce the degree of customer input
in prior art systems (specification, p. 2, lines 6-16).
Payton is directed to a virtual on-demand information system
(such as for movies, games, computer applications) wherein the
information is downloaded to a storage device at the subscriber
during non-peak hours based on an information filtering system
that predicts items the subscriber might like, and therefore
request. A subscriber database stores a subscriber profile which
includes a rating vector in which the user subscriber has rated
each of the items he or she has previously requested (col. 5,
lines 6-12). Alternatively, the system could just record the use
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