Ex Parte Aubry et alDownload PDFPatent Trial and Appeal BoardSep 29, 201713113008 (P.T.A.B. Sep. 29, 2017) Copy Citation 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. 13/113,008 05/20/2011 Jean-Philippe Aubry PT1124US00 8688 132326 7590 Thompson Hine LLP 10050 Innovation Drive Suite 400 Dayton, OH 45342-4934 EXAMINER VETTER, DANIEL ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER 3628 NOTIFICATION DATE DELIVERY MODE 10/03/2017 ELECTRONIC 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. Notice of the Office communication was sent electronically on above-indicated "Notification Date" to the following e-mail address(es): ipdocket @ thompsonhine. com PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07) UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD Ex parte JEAN-PHILIPPE AUBRY, BENOIT JANIN, RUDY DANIELLO, LUC ISNARDY, and CLAUDINE REYNAUD Appeal 2016-008329 Application 13/113,008 Technology Center 3600 Before HUNG H. BUI, JOYCE CRAIG, and AARON W. MOORE, Administrative Patent Judges. Opinion for the Board filed by Administrative Patent Judge CRAIG. Opinion Dissenting filed by Administrative Patent Judge MOORE. DECISION ON APPEAL Appellants1 appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from the Examiner’s Final Rejection of claims 1, 3—8, 10-13, 15—18, and 20-22, which are all of the claims pending in this application. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b). We affirm. 1 According to Appellants, the real party in interest is Amadeus S.A.S. (Biot, France). App. Br. 3. Appeal 2016-008329 Application 13/113,008 INVENTION Appellants’ invention relates to a method and system for an improved reservation system optimizing repeated search requests. Abstract. Claim 1 reads as follows: 1. A method for generating responses to travel queries received at a computer having access to a travel database, the method comprising: receiving first and second travel queries at the computer, each travel query being associated with a different user, including one or more parameters, and having one or more degrees of freedom; pre-processing the first and second travel queries with the computer by: decomposing the first and second travel queries into a plurality of simple request elements each having no degrees of freedom; sorting the plurality of simple request elements according to at least one of the one or more parameters to identify at least one duplicated simple request element; deleting the at least one duplicated simple request element from the plurality of simple request elements to generate a plurality of unduplicated simple request elements; and grouping the plurality of unduplicated simple request elements into subsets of simple request elements according to a predetermined criteria; forwarding the subsets of simple request elements to a process module, the process module executing the simple request elements by interrogating the travel database and receiving results from the travel database; and for each of the first and second travel queries, aggregating the results from the process module corresponding to the one or more parameters of the travel query into a response and issuing the response to the user associated with the travel query. 2 Appeal 2016-008329 Application 13/113,008 REJECTION Claims 1, 3—8, 10-13, 15—18, and 20-22 stand rejected under pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as unpatentable over the combination of Hirose et al. (US 8,463,627 Bl; issued June 11, 2013) (“Hirose”) and DeMarcken (US 2004/0078251 Al; published Apr. 22, 2004). ANALYSIS In rejecting claim 1, the Examiner found that Hirose teaches all of the limitations recited in claim 1, except the queries having one or more degrees of freedom, and that determining at least one simple request element is done by decomposing the first and second travel queries into simple request elements having no degrees of freedom. Final Act. 3^4. The Examiner relied on DeMarcken as teaching or suggesting those missing limitations. Id. at 4. Appellants contend the cited portions of DeMarcken do not disclose the limitation “decomposing the first and second travel queries into a plurality of simple request elements each having no degrees of freedom,” as recited in claim 1. App. Br. 10—12. Appellants also argue that DeMarcken teaches away from the disputed limitation. Id. at 12. According to Appellants, DeMarcken does not disclose any examples of a sub-query having no degrees of freedom, and instead teaches that dividing the original query into sub-queries having no degrees of freedom would be undesirable. Id. Appellants’ arguments do not persuade us of Examiner error. We agree with the Examiner that, under the broadest reasonable interpretation, 3 Appeal 2016-008329 Application 13/113,008 claim 1 requires that the initial queries comprise only one parameter. The Examiner found, and we agree, that DeMarcken teaches decomposing a query comprised of an airport parameter into a plurality of request elements each having no degrees of freedom. See Ans. 2 (citing DeMarcken || 21— 23). In particular, the cited portions of DeMarcken teach decomposing a query for travel to “SFO or SJC” airports into two subqueries, one for SFO [San Francisco International Airport] and one for SJC [San Jose International Airport], in which the value of the airport is set. Id. Appellants have not persuasively shown that the Examiner’s interpretation of claim 1 is overly broad, unreasonable, or inconsistent with the Specification. Appellants’ argument that sub-query 1 in DeMarcken “includes at least one degree of freedom in the selection of the departure date for the outbound flight, and at least another degree of freedom in the selection of the departure date for the return flight” (Reply Br. 2) is not persuasive at least because, as the Examiner concluded, the queries in claim 1 require only a single parameter. Thus, we agree with the Examiner that DeMarcken’s teachings with respect to the decomposition of a query regarding airports SFO and SJC teach or suggest the disputed limitation of claim 1. However, as the Examiner explained, DeMarcken also teaches dividing queries into requests with no degrees of freedom with respect to both airport and date. Ans. 3. DeMarcken teaches dividing a query with a single date range into up to “N” subqueries. See Ans. 2—3 (citing DeMarcken || 33—41). DeMarcken further teaches “it may be desirable to split both the original query’s time range and its destinations” simultaneously. DeMarcken | 57. 4 Appeal 2016-008329 Application 13/113,008 The test for obviousness is not whether the claimed invention is expressly suggested in any one or all of the references, but whether the claimed subject matter would have been obvious to those of ordinary skill in the art in light of the combined teachings of those references. In re Keller, 642 F.2d 413, 425 (CCPA 1981). Here, Appellants have not persuaded us that the claimed subject matter would not have been obvious to an artisan of ordinary skill in light of the cited portions of DeMarcken in combination with the cited teachings of Hirose. We are also not persuaded by Appellants’ argument that paragraph 38 of DeMarcken teaches away from dividing a travel query into sub-queries having no degrees of freedom. See App. Br. 12. Appellants have not identified where DeMarcken actually criticizes, discredits, or otherwise discourages “decomposing the first and second travel queries into a plurality of simple request elements each having no degrees of freedom.” See In re Fulton, 391 F.3d 1195, 1201 (Fed. Cir. 2004). We agree with the Examiner that paragraph 38’s teaching of an algorithm that will avoid dividing the original query into ‘“unnecessarily many sub-queries’” in order not to waste computing resources is insufficient to teach away from the disputed limitation of claim 1. See Ans. 3. For these reasons, we are not persuaded that the Examiner erred in finding that the combination of Hirose and DeMarcken teaches or suggests the disputed limitations of claim 1. Accordingly, we sustain the Examiner’s 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) rejection of independent claim 1, as well as the Examiner’s 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) rejection of independent claims 8, 13, and 15, which Appellants argue are patentable for similar reasons. App. Br. 12. We also sustain the Examiner’s 5 Appeal 2016-008329 Application 13/113,008 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) rejection of dependent claims 3—7, 10—12, 16—18, and 20—22, not argued separately. Id. DECISION The decision of the Examiner to reject claims 1, 3—8, 10-13, 15—18, and 20—22 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)(l)(iv). See C.F.R. § 41.50(f). AFFIRMED 6 Appeal 2016-008329 Application 13/113,008 UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD Ex parte JEAN-PHILIPPE AUBRY, BENOIT JANIN, RUDY DANIELLO, LUC ISNARDY, and CLAUDINE REYNAUD Appeal 2016-008329 Application 13/113,008 Technology Center 3600 Before HUNG H. BUI, JOYCE CRAIG, and AARON W. MOORE, Administrative Patent Judges. MOORE, Administrative Patent Judge, dissenting. I agree with Appellants that DeMarcken does not teach dividing a travel query into sub-queries having no degrees of freedom. DeMarcken’s paragraph 21 shows the original query for a two part trip. For part 1, both destination and departure date have multiple degrees of freedom. For part 2, both origin and departure date have multiple degrees of freedom. The reference then explains that this query can be divided into sub-queries, for example by destination airport, as shown in paragraphs 23 through 28. Still, however, each of the sub-queries (and each of the parts of the sub-queries) has at least one degree of freedom. In my view, in order to show what is claimed (“decomposing the first and second travel queries into a plurality of simple request elements each 7 Appeal 2016-008329 Application 13/113,008 having no degrees of freedom”), DeMarcken would have to divide the parts of the sub-queries into sub-parts, such as BOS-SFO-8/17; BOS-SFO-8/18; SFO-BOS-8/23; SFO-BOS-8/24; SFO-BOS-8/25; etc. The reference does not describe such an approach. I also do not believe the Examiner’s discussion of “parameters” justifies the majority’s result. Although the claim does recite that a query includes “one or more parameters,” meaning that the claim would cover a query with a single parameter, DeMarcken does not describe a query with a single parameter. I do not agree that the “one or more parameters” claim language means that one may appropriately map the claimed query to just one parameter of the DeMarcken multiple parameter queries, because I do not believe that a skilled artisan would conclude that a single parameter of a multiple parameter query is, on its own, also a query. All queries, sub queries, and parts described in DeMarcken include at least one degree of freedom, contrary to what is claimed. The Examiner found that “DeMarcken fully discloses queries divided into requests with no degrees of freedom with respect to both airport and date.” (Ans. 3; see also Final Act. 2, 4.) I would not address whether it would have been obvious to modify DeMarcken by further dividing its parts into sub-parts with no degrees of freedom because I do not think that is a finding made by the Examiner. For these reasons, I respectfully dissent from the decision to affirm the Section 103 rejection of claims 1, 3—8, 10-13, 15—18, and 20-22. 8 Copy with citationCopy as parenthetical citation