Appeal No. 2006-1342
Application No. 09/488,471
whereas survey information may be updated in Peters by a collator, there is no indication in the
reference that updated information relates to ratings and/or that such updates automatically cause
an off-line ranking system to “re-index the rating data,” and/or cause a result sorter to generate
ranked matches based on the re-indexed rating data, as required by the instant claims.
It is true that the examiner relies on BizRate for the claimed “rating data,” but since
Peters does not seem to be concerned with such data, the question arises as to why the skilled
artisan would have been led to apply any of the teachings in Peters to the business rating system
of BizRate. Moreover, since the indexing of data in Peters does not appear to be similar to the
indexing feature of the instant claimed invention and BizRate clearly suggests nothing in the way
of indexing, as claimed, it must be asked why the skilled artisan would have applied any
indexing of the rating data in BizRate.
Moreover, we find nothing in Peters related to the claimed “re-index” of rating data. The
examiner appears to rely on column 26, lines 43-50, for this feature but reference to that portion
of Peters reveals only updating of a respondent’s answer information.
While our list of the deficiencies of the applied references is not exhaustive, it is clear
that the proposed combination lacks many of the claimed elements. Moreover, as mentioned
supra, we find inadequate motivation for making the examiner’s proposed combination. But
12
Page: Previous 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007