Appeal 2007-1401
Application 09/882,094
led one having ordinary skill in the art to the claimed step of associating an active
or inactive status code with part data based upon results of evaluating part data and
activity data.
The Examiner further relied on Liff as documentary evidence supporting his
taking of official notice that maintaining a status of “active” or “inactive” for
database information is well known in the art (Answer 11, citing Liff, col. 19,
ll. 18-19). The Appellants contend that even if combined with Huang, Liff fails to
cure the deficiencies of Huang (Br. 6). Liff is directed to “an apparatus and
method for automated dispensing of packaged pharmaceuticals” (Finding of
Fact 30). Liff’s database includes a medication history for each patient, and tracks
active and inactive medications, including the date the medication was dispensed
(Finding of Fact 31). While we agree that Liff discloses generally that prior art
databases have included active and inactive data, we see no apparent reason why
one skilled in the art would have used this general teaching to evaluate part data
and activity data and then apply an active or inactive status code based on the
evaluation. Liff is teaching maintaining a history for each customer of the
customer’s active and inactive patient prescriptions, and does not teach evaluating
and indicating whether certain pharmaceuticals in the pharmacy’s database are
active or inactive (Finding of Fact 32). Further, prescriptions are not “parts”
(Finding of Fact 33), and thus Liff’s teaching would not have led one having
ordinary skill to evaluate and assign an active or inactive status code to a part.
The Examiner found that the motivation for combining the code assigning
feature of “active” vs. “inactive” with the method of Huang is found in Huang’s
13
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Next
Last modified: September 9, 2013