Appeal No. 2005-1644
Application 09/400,583
and product path ... in order to better place and offer products
in relation to customer actions" (FR7).
It is evident that the claim limitation at issue is
"generating data relationships using data mining techniques,
wherein the data relationships associate individual customers
with information related to the individual customers." The
specification discloses that the association could be by means of
a customer card and the information related to the individual
customers could be personal information, such as age, address,
occupation, etc., where "the retail establishment receives the
ability to aggregate information concerning the customer's buying
habits" (page 27). Hughes is directed to analyzing spatial
relationships in the placement of items in the store and does not
discuss data mining based on the individual customers. Thus,
this limitation is a difference over Hughes.
Appellants argue that "Toung quite clearly describes
collecting information about multiple customers and then using
that information to target particular demographics" (Br4) and
"Toung does not teach generating data relationships that
associate individual customers with information related to that
individual" (Br4).
Toung discloses:
With millions of customer transactions passing through
its stores, Wal-Mart has built one of the largest data bases
in the country. Through data mining techniques, managers
are extracting information about customer buying patterns
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