Ex Parte Chang

Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences

Jul 27, 2010

10832757 (B.P.A.I. Jul. 27, 2010)

UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
United States Patent and Trademark Office
Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS
P.O. Box 1450
Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450
www.uspto.gov
APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO.
10/832,757 04/26/2004 William I. Chang 70174.5 (M-15351 US) 3775
32605 7590 07/28/2010
Haynes and Boone, LLP
IP Section
2323 Victory Avenue
SUITE 700
Dallas, TX 75219
EXAMINER
LE, JESSICA N
ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER
2161
MAIL DATE DELIVERY MODE
07/28/2010 PAPER
Please find below and/or attached an Office communication concerning this application or proceeding.
The time period for reply, if any, is set in the attached communication.
PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07)
UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
____________________

BEFORE THE BOARD OF PATENT APPEALS
AND INTERFERENCES
____________________

Ex parte WILLIAM I. CHANG
____________________

Appeal 2009-0058631
Application 10/832,757
Technology Center 2100
____________________

Before JOSEPH L. DIXON, LANCE LEONARD BARRY, and JEAN R.
HOMERE, Administrative Patent Judges.

HOMERE, Administrative Patent Judge.

DECISION ON APPEAL2

1 Filed April 26, 2004. The real party in interest is Affini Inc. (App. Br. 2.)
2 The two-month time period for filing an appeal or commencing a civil
action, as recited in 37 C.F.R. § 1.304, or for filing a request for rehearing,
as recited in 37 C.F.R. § 41.52, begins to run from the “MAIL DATE”
(paper delivery mode) or the “NOTIFICATION DATE” (electronic delivery
mode) shown on the PTOL-90A cover letter attached to this decision.

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I. STATEMENT OF THE CASE
Appellant appeals under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) (2002) from the
Examiner’s final rejection of claims 19 through 40. (App. Br. 4.) Claims 1
through 18 have been canceled. Id. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C.
§ 6(b) (2008).
We reverse.
Appellant’s Invention
Appellant invented a method and system for retrieving timely and
relevant web pages from the Internet. (Spec. 1, ll. 9-11.) As shown in
Appellant’s Figure 2, upon receiving a user’s query, a query engine (201)
uses indexed search resources (202) to process the query, and to
subsequently return to the user search results containing one or more URLs
and corresponding web pages potentially stored in a web cache table (203).
(Spec. 7, ll. 25-30.) The table (203) records the age of the last access of the
website associated with each URL to thereby index the URLs on the basis on
their recent access, as well as to delete from the table (203) records that
exceed a predetermined age. (Id. at ll. 31-36.) Consequently, if a URL in the
search result is also present in the table (203), the URL is thus inserted in a
refresh list (206) with along with a finite probability function that depends
on the age of the URL in the table (203). However, if the URL is absent
from the table (203), it is displayed in the refresh list (206) along with an
infinite probability. (Id. at 8, ll. 3-13.)

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Illustrative Claim
Independent claim 19 further illustrates the invention. It reads as
follows:
19. An adaptive feedback method for ensuring timeliness of a collection
of web pages, comprising:
extracting a URL from a search result; and
determining whether or not a web page corresponding to the URL is
present in whole or in part in the collection, wherein:
when the web page is determined to be present in the collection,
downloading and replacing the web page in the collection in accordance
with a first probability; and
when the web page is determined not to be present in the
collection, downloading and including the web page in the collection.

Prior Art Relied Upon
The Examiner relies on the following prior art as evidence of
unpatentability:
Meyerzon 6,638,314 B1 Oct. 28, 2003
Popovitch 2004/0064442 A1 Apr. 1, 2004

Rejections on Appeal
The Examiner rejects the claims on appeal as follows:
1. Claims 19-23, 25, 29-34, 36 and 40 stand rejected under 35
U.S.C. § 102(e) as being anticipated by Popovitch.
2. Claims 24, 26-28, 35, and 37-39 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C.
§ 103(a) as being unpatentable over the combination of Popovitch and
Meyerzon.

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Appellant’s Contentions
Appellant contends that Popovitch does not teach, upon determining
that a located webpage is also present in a collection of web pages, replacing
the webpage in the collection according to a first probability, as recited in
independent claim 1. (App. Br. 9-11, Reply Br. 1-6.) According to
Appellant, Popovitch discloses a deterministic process that associates a
timestamp with each document and ranks each corresponding URLs based
on importance and change metrics whereas the claimed invention requires
replacing a webpage in a collection according to a probabilistic function.
(App. Br. 9-10, Reply Br. 4-5.)
Examiner’s Findings
The Examiner finds that Popovitch’s disclosure of storing in an
archive the date and time with each version of a document teaches storing
the age of the document or the probability as a function of time according to
which a document is replaced. (Ans. 11.)

II. ISSUE
Has Appellant shown that the Examiner erred in finding that
Popovitch teaches replacing a webpage in a collection of web pages in
accordance with a first probability, as recited in independent claim 19?

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III. FINDINGS OF FACT
The following Findings of Fact (FF) are shown by a preponderance of
the evidence:
Popovitch
1. Popovitch discloses an incremental search engine for providing
incremental search results in response to a user query as a difference crawler
locates additional matches with new or modified documents. (Abst.)
2. As shown in Figure 1, upon receiving a query from a user (100) via
the network (102), a web site system (104) within the server computer
system (103) stores information about the query in a queries database (110)
while storing information about the user (100) in a users database (112).
(Para. [0031].)
3. The web site system (104) also includes a difference crawler
(114) that incrementally retrieves documents that match the user’s query.
For each retrieved document, the crawler extracts therefrom related URLs,
which it stores at a URL server (116). As new documents become available
or existing documents modified, the crawler matches them against existing
user queries, and sends newly extracted URLs therefrom to the URL server
(116). (Para. [0033, 0035].)
4. The difference crawler (114) then sorts the URLs based on an
importance metric and a change metric computed for each URL. The
importance metric indicates how often the URL is visited and refreshed, and
the change metric indicates how much and how frequently the document has
been changed. (Para. [0036-37].)
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5. The difference crawler (114) uses a document archive (122) to
store different versions of each document along with the date and time each
version was stored. For each URL associated with a newly retrieved
document, the difference crawler (114) determines if another version of the
same document associated with the same URL is already stored in the
document archive (122). If so, the URL server is notified and a timestamp
of the different versions is recorded. If no prior versions of the document
pertaining to the URL were previously stored in the document archive (122),
then the newly retrieved document is added thereto in connection with the
associated URL. (Para. [0038, 0071-72].)

IV. ANALYSIS
Anticipation
Independent claim 19 requires, in relevant part, replacing a webpage
in a collection of web pages in accordance with a first probability upon
determining that the web page is already present in the collection. (App. Br.
14, Claims App’x.)
As set forth in the Findings of Fact section, Popovitch discloses a
difference crawler that records the different versions and the corresponding
age for each document associated with a URL to thereby form a collection of
web pages that are compared against a newly retrieved document or web
page. (FF. 3, 5.) Further, Popovitch teaches that, upon determining that a
prior version of the newly retrieved document exists in the collection of
documents, informing the URL server to add it to the collection in the
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document archive if the newly retrieved document is significantly different.
(FF. 5.) Additionally, Popovitch discloses ranking all recorded URLs based
on how frequently documents associated therewith are accessed, refreshed
and modified. (FF. 4.) We find that Popovitch teaches, at best, adding a
newly retrieved document to a collection of documents, and ranking URLs
associated with the documents based on how often they are accessed. It is
worth noting that both versions of the document are maintained in the
document database. In other words, the newer version is not used to replace
an older version. While the cited portions of Popovitch may, in the
aggregate, suggest that the newly added document version can serve to
replace an older version of the document stored in the document collection,
such suggestion is not sufficient to justify the anticipation rejection.
Moreover, we agree with Appellant that the Examiner mischaracterizes the
age of the documents as the claimed probability for replacing an older
document in the collection with the newly retrieved document. While it is
possible to express the age of each document as a probability, such
conjecture would require for us to speculate, and to broadly interpret
Popovitch’s disclosure beyond the reasonable limits of anticipation.
Popovitch simply fails to teach replacing an existing document within the
collection of document with a newly retrieved document based on a
probability. Since Appellant has shown at least one error in the Examiner’s
rejection, we need not address Appellant’s other arguments. It follows that
Appellant has shown that the Examiner erred in finding that Popovitch
anticipates independent claim 19.
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Since 20-23, 25, 29-34, 36 and 40 also recited the disputed limitations
discussed above, Appellant has shown for the foregoing reasons that the
Examiner also erred in finding that Popovitch anticipate those claims as
well.
Obviousness
Regarding dependent claims 24, 26-28, 35, 37-39, Appellant argues
that they are patentable over the proffered combination since Meyerzon does
not cure the noted deficiencies of Popovitch, as argued for independent
claims 19 and 30 from which these claims depend. (App. Br. 12.) We agree
with Appellant since dependent claims 24, 26-28, 35, 37-39 incorporate the
limitations or their respective base claims by virtue of their dependency
thereon. It therefore follows that for the same reasons detailed above in our
discussion of claims 19 and 30 that Appellant has also shown error in the
Examiner’s rejection of the cited dependent claims as being unpatentable
over the combination of Popovitch and Meyerzon.

V. CONCLUSIONS OF LAW
1. Appellant has established that the Examiner erred in rejecting
claims 19-23, 25, 29-34, 36 and 40 as being anticipated under
35 U.S.C. § 102.
2. Appellant has established that the Examiner erred in rejecting
claims 24, 26-28, 35,and 37-39 as being unpatentable under
35 U.S.C. § 103(a).

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VI. DECISION
We reverse the Examiner's rejections of claims 19 through 40.

REVERSED

Erc

Haynes and Boone, LLP
IP Section
2323 Victory Avenue
SUITE 700
Dallas, TX 75219