Appeal No. 2007-0332
Application No. 10/316,312
The Examiner disagrees. The Examiner notes that Chipman uses a
web crawler to extract data, pointing to fig. 2 (“Web Crawler 205”), and col.
9, lines 8-10. The Examiner further notes that Chipman discloses a data
translator, pointing again to fig. 2 (“protocol translator 204”) and also to the
protocol translator described at col. 12, l. 25 (Answer 8).
We begin our analysis by noting the particular sequence of steps
recited by the method of claim 1, where the extracting step is recited before
the translating step. “Unless the steps of a method actually recite an order,
the steps are not ordinarily construed to require one.” Interactive Gift
Express, Inc. v. Compuserve Inc., 256 F.3d 1323, 1342-43, 59 USPQ2d
1401, 1416 (Fed. Cir. 2001), citing Loral Fairchild Corp. v. Sony Corp., 181
F.3d 1313, 1322, 50 USPQ2d 1865, 1870 (Fed. Cir. 1999) (stating that “not
every process claim is limited to the performance of its steps in the order
written.”). In the instant case, we note that the antecedent basis for the step
of “translating the data unit” is established by the preceding step of
“extracting at least one data unit from the source data” (claim 1, emphasis
added). Therefore, we conclude the language of claim 1 does require an
order of steps, i.e., the step of extracting at least one data unit must be
performed before the step of translating the data unit.
Because the language of claim 1 requires the extracting step to be
performed before the translating step, we conclude that the logic of the
Examiner’s rejection fails to meet the language of the claim. In particular,
we note that Chipman’s web crawler 205 (col. 9, ll. 8-9) is implemented by
the user (i.e., customer) to retrieve web pages that have previously been
encoded or “translated” (by a supplier) to conform to a special “predefined
protocol,” such as the protocol designated using the <UC> tag in one
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