Appeal No. 2005-2583
Application No. 09/328,893
arranged in individual records which is searchable, we do not find that appellants’
specification provides support for such a narrow definition of the term database. Further,
we find that that other definitions of database, which do not require the data to be
organized in records or searchable, are more consistent with the disclosure in appellants’
originally filed specification. The Dictionary of Computers, Information Processing And
Telecommunications, 2nd Edition, provides the following definitions:
1) a collection of data fundamental to a system.
2) a collection of data fundamental to an enterprise
3) a set of data that is sufficient for a given purpose or for one or several given
data processing systems.
4) a collection of interrelated or independent data items stored together without
unnecessary redundancy, to serve one or more applications.
5) see relational data base, sub-data base.
None of these definitions require that a database be searchable or that the data be
organized in any particular format, only that it is a collection of data. Appellants’
specification on page 4 states, “[t]he database DB, which is implemented on a hard disk,
contains objects swapped out of the memory.” Further, the description of appellants
invention on pages 5 through 7 of the originally filed specification discuss writing data to
and retrieving data from the database, but make no mention of the searching the database
or that it is organized into records. Thus, we consider the scope of claim 1 to be that the
database is a collection of data.
As discussed on page 7 in our decision, dated November 22, 2005, we find that
Bennett teaches swapping objects into or out of memory as needed. Bennett teaches that
the objects are swapped between main memory and bulk memory (e.g. disk memory).
See column 1, line 11 and lines 43 through 46. We consider the bulk memory which
stores the data to be a database as claimed and described in appellants’ specification, as it
is a collection of interrelated data . Thus, appellants’ arguments have not persuaded us of
error in the new grounds of rejection under 37 CFR§ 41.50(b) of claim 1.
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