Appeal No. 2002-2011
Application No. 09/163,643
category relative to a hypertext reference (column 2, lines 38-
40).
However, we find nothing disclosed or suggested by any of
the references relative to the claimed feature of associating the
bookmarks by creating an affinity link “responsive to the
affinity exceeding a predetermined threshold.” The examiner
relies on pages 6-7 of Maarek for this suggestion. However, we
have read and re-read the Maarek reference, concentrating on the
cited portions thereof, and we are at a loss to find any clear
suggestion of this claim limitation. The examiner appears to
rely on the disclosure, at page 7, of expressing a minimum degree
of intra-cluster similarity as a “percentage” as a finding that
the reference discloses an affinity “threshold.”
While we cannot glean such a conclusion from pages 6-7 of
Maarek, even if we were to find that some kind of threshold is
suggested by Maarek, it still begs the question as to why the
skilled artisan would have applied any such teaching to the
teachings of Burke and Mantha in order to modify these references
so that there is an association between bookmarks by the creation
of an affinity link “responsive to the affinity exceeding a
predetermined threshold.” The examiner does not satisfactorily
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