Ex Parte LI

Patent Trial and Appeal Board

Sep 27, 2012

11159937 (P.T.A.B. Sep. 27, 2012)

UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
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BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD
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Ex parte JIN LI
____________

Appeal 2010-006235
Application 11/159,937
Technology Center 2100
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Before MAHSHID D. SAADAT, DAVID M. KOHUT,
and TREVOR M. JEFFERSON, Administrative Patent Judges.

SAADAT, Administrative Patent Judge.

DECISION ON APPEAL

Appellant appeals under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from a final rejection of
claims 1-13, which constitute all the claims pending in this application. We
have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b).
We affirm.

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STATEMENT OF THE CASE
Introduction
Appellant’s invention relates to a utility development tool used by a
servlet program developer (see Spec. 2:22-30). Claim 1, which is illustrative
of the invention, reads as follows:
1. A method of generating servlet program code, to
reduce input parameter interface error, comprising:
receiving a form description file for a form configured to
be served by a server;
automatically parsing said form to discover input
parameters for gathering information in the form from tags in
the form, the input parameters being areas of the form used to
gather user entered input;
automatically updating the form description file with the
input parameters; and
automatically generating said servlet program code to
receive said input parameters, wherein the servlet program is
specifically adapted to the form.

The Examiner’s Rejection
Claims 1-13 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being
unpatentable over Helgeson (US 6,643,652 B2) and Dhar (US 2002/0040312
A1).
Appellant’s Contentions
1. Appellant contends that the Examiner’s position does not
identify any disclosure in Helgeson indicating that its RQL1 parser parses the
data object that is received from the first system and translated to a generic
interchange format (Br. 5). Appellant specifically points out:

1 RDF Query Language (RQL): an XML-based query language for writing
queries against Resource Description Framework (RDF) data (Helgeson, col.
115, ll. 1-3).
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The Examiner equates the form of the claimed invention with
the data object of Helgeson that is received from a first system
in a first system specific local format and translated from the
first system specific local format to a generic interchange
format object with predefined stylesheets. Col. 2, lines 55-61.
The Examiner then attempts to equate the parsing of the form
description file as included in the claimed invention with the
RQL parser of Helgeson that parses an RQL document and
executes the query using the DatabaseMR. Col. 128, lines 56-
58. However, Helgeson’s RQL parser only parses an RQL
document and executes the query.
(Id.).
2. Appellant further asserts that the RQL document of Helgeson is
parsed to execute the query in the document, and not to discover input
parameters for gathering information about form tags (Br. 5-6). Appellant
contends that such parsing in Helgeson is not the same as “automatically
parsing said form to discover input parameters for gathering information in
the form from tags in the form, the input parameters being areas of the form
used to gather user entered input” recited in claim 1 (Br. 6). Appellant
further states that:
[t]he parsing as included in the claimed invention is not merely
done in order to execute a query as in Helgeson, but instead is
done to discover input parameters for gathering information in
the form from tags in the form, the input parameters being areas
of the form used to gather user entered input.
(Id.).
3. Appellant contends that the cited portions of Helgeson do not
teach or suggest “automatically generating said servlet program code to
receive said input parameters” (Br. 6-7).
4. Lastly, Appellant contends that the relied-on portions of
Helgeson fail to disclose or suggest automatically updating the form
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description file with the input parameters (Br. 7). Appellant specifically
asserts that:
The Examiner equates the form description file of the claimed
invention with the model page of Helgeson. However, the
passages of Helgeson cited by the Examiner fail to disclose that
its model page is automatically updated. Rather, the model page
of Helgeson is a template for translating data from one format,
and, as such, automatic modification is not envisioned.
(Id.).
Issue on Appeal
Has the Examiner erred in rejecting the claims as being obvious over
Helgeson and Dhar because the combination of references does not teach or
suggest the disputed features recited in claim 1?

ANALYSIS
We have reviewed the Examiner’s rejections in light of Appellant’s
arguments that the Examiner has erred. We disagree with Appellant’s
conclusions. We adopt as our own the findings and reasons set forth by the
Examiner in the action from which this appeal is taken and the reasons set
forth by the Examiner in the Examiner’s Answer in response to Appellant’s
Appeal Brief (see Ans. 9-12). However, we highlight and address specific
findings and arguments regarding claim 1 for emphasis as follows.
With respect to the above contention 1, the Examiner responds that
Helgeson uses tag libraries to define the gathered document information by
the RQL parser (Ans. 10). The Examiner further asserts that the process of
returning a vector of matching resources “can take the form of ‘widgets’, for
example, in which user input is gathered and applied within a generated
form” (id.). We specifically agree with the Examiner’s reasoning that the
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widgets described by Helgeson, which represent elements common to web
applications and have fields or links for user interactivity (co. 51, ll. 38-46;
col. 54, ll. 20-55), provide for the input parameters that gather the
information entered by the user.
With respect to the above contentions 2 and 3, we concur with the
Examiner’s findings and conclusion that the servlet of Helgeson uses input
parameters to generate servlet object adapted to the form (Ans. 11). The
Examiner properly cites to columns 27 and 56 of Helgeson for the details of
servlet functions that automatically obtain different information entered by
the user (id.). Helgeson further describes identifying the requested file
followed by determining the location of the file object and parsing the
identified file to discover the input parameters (col. 56, ll. 16-57) which is
performed automatically by the control file processor (col. 57, ll. 22-46). As
stated by the Examiner (Ans. 11), the servlet program that receives the input
parameters is generated automatically by the “getDocument” process which
provides the resulting document object model (DOM) based on parsing the
control file (col. 56, ll. 16-50).
Regarding the above contention 4, we also agree with the Examiner
(Ans. 12) that the above discussion of widgets shows that the content values
may be dynamically updated by a content server (Ans. 12, citing Helgeson,
col. 49, ll. 40-64). Furthermore, as stated by the Examiner (id.), the content
server of Helgeson provides a web content generation engine which
automatically acquires data from different sources based on the input
parameters and presents the content in a corresponding format similar to the
features recited in claim 1.
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CONCLUSION
On the record before us, we conclude that, because the references
teach or suggest all the disputed claim limitations, the Examiner has not
erred in rejecting claim 1, as well as claims 2-13 not argued separately, as
being obvious over Helgeson and Dhar.

DECISION
The decision of the Examiner rejecting claims 1-13 is affirmed.
No time period for taking any subsequent action in connection with
this appeal may be extended under 37 C.F.R. § 1.136(a)(1)(iv).

AFFIRMED

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