Appeal No. 2002-1875
Application 09/245,776
Cupps teaches "a set of queries for the user to ask the customer,
the responses to which are entered by the user and are used to
automatically populate the order entry page" at column 9, line 47
to column 10, line 6.
Appellants argue that claim 1 requires two entities of a
"user" and a "customer" and Cupps only discloses a customer
interacting with an ordering machine (Br6). It is argued that
claim 1 recites a "set of queries," where "queries" is defined as
a question or an inquiry, and the choices or selections in Cupps
are not "queries" nor a "set of queries for the user to ask the
customer" (Br6-7). Appellants argue that even if the menu
choices in Cupps are queries, Cupps teaches only a single entity
(i.e., a customer) interacting with a machine and does not
disclose that responses by a customer to a set of queries from a
user are entered by the user (Br7).
The examiner reads the "user" on the computer in Cupps for
the first time in the examiner's answer (EA8). The examiner
further finds that Cupps teaches a set of queries because it asks
for the customer location, the type of service the customer
seeks, and the range of miles that the customer is willing to
drive (FR6; EA9). The examiner finds that "[s]ince the order
machine is interpreted as the user, it's obvious that the
response are entered by the order machine, in order to populate
the order entry page" (EA9).
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