Appeal No. 2006-0567
Application 09/938,256
OPINION
For the reasons set forth by the examiner in the
Answer, as expanded upon here, we sustain the rejection of
claims 1 and 3 through 27 under 35 U.S.C. § 103.
Both the examiner and appellants recognize that Zhu
does not teach the claimed feature of a series of explicit
questions to the user. On the other hand, the background of Zhu
makes clear that his invention stems from a history in the art of
what has been characterized as query processing. In fact, the
“Summary of the Invention” at column 3, line 26, characterizes
Zhu’s invention as a “system for user preference-based query
processing.” Rather than posing to the user of Zhu’s system
explicit questions, the examiner is correct in the assessment of
Zhu at page 4 of the Answer as embellished upon in the remarks at
pages 7 and 8 as well, that Zhu may be fairly characterized as
presenting to the user a series of implicit or implied questions
to therefore invoke from the user a response as to his or her
preference with respect to certain data items, such as image
components and/or depictive features in images. Even though
figures 7, 8 and 9 of Zhu depict actual questions with question
mark punctuation within the decision blocks in these figures,
3
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007