Appeal No. 2004-1176 Page 6
Application No. 09/232,751
We turn now to claims 17-19, which require tracking of changes in operating
environment, including changes in available “service capacity to service sales” for a
plurality of goods, and determining which of the plurality of goods are to be promoted
based on the changes in operating environment. We have carefully considered the
positions of both the examiner (answer, page 14-16) and appellants (brief, pages 10-11)
as well as appellants’ specification (page 7) in interpreting the claim terminology
“service capacity to service sales” and find ourselves in agreement with appellants that
the examiner’s interpretation of this terminology as being either synonymous with or
sufficiently broad to encompass inventory level is unreasonable. We arrive at this
conclusion for two reasons. First, appellants’ specification (page 7) expressly refers to
service capacity and inventory level separately, thereby indicating that these are two
separate conditions. Second, the terminology “service capacity to service sales” by its
own terms would appear to one of ordinary skill in the art to refer to resources available
to process or service sales of a product, rather than to inventory of the product itself.
While it is true that the claims in a patent application are to be given their broadest
reasonable interpretation consistent with the specification during prosecution of a patent
application (see, for example, In re Zletz, 893 F.2d 319, 321, 13 USPQ2d 1320, 1322
(Fed. Cir. 1989)), it is also well settled that terms in a claim should be construed as
those skilled in the art would construe them (see Specialty Composites v. Cabot Corp.,
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