Appeal No. 2002-1844
Application 08/975,428
that the examiner equates "transforming" to "parsing,
categorizing, indexing, and formatting." The examiner admits
that these functions are not expressly taught in Gerace.
Gerace discloses a method and apparatus for collecting and
analyzing information about Internet users, in particular, the
history of users viewing advertisements, including the number of
times viewed by a user ("hits"), the number of times selected for
further information by a user ("click through"), and/or the
number of purchases initiated from display of the advertisement
to a user to provide for automatic targeting of audiences
(col. 2, lines 35-52; col. 5, lines 26-40; col. 12, lines 11-15).
This information is stored in various objects, such as Ad Package
Object 33b (Fig. 5B, last four lines; col. 12, lines 7-21) and is
analyzed in various reports (col. 12, line 56, to col. 13,
line 33). With respect to step (c) of claim 1, the claimed "data
elements obtained in said step (b)" must refer to data elements
stored in the various ad packages. However, as with the
rejection of claim 1 over Hyodo, we fail to see how at least the
steps of "categorizing, indexing, and formatting the data
elements" is inherent in Gerace: the data elements are already
categorized (e.g., "hit," "clickthrough," and "order" in Fig. 5)
and formatted and it is not apparent how indexing applies.
Although the examiner is undoubtably correct that "parsing,
categorizing, indexing, and formatting" were all well known in
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