DETAILED ACTION
This communication is in response to Request for Continued Examination filed on December 22nd, 2025. Claims 1-2, 7-10, 15-18 and 20-21 are amended; claims 1-3, 5, 7-11, 13, 15-19 and 20-21 are pending and have been examined.
All previous objections/rejections not mentioned in this communication have been withdrawn by the Examiner.
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Priority
Applicant claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Applications 63/482851 and 63/482955, each filed on February 2nd, 2023. Claims 1-3, 5, 7-11, 13, 15-19 and 20-21 have been afforded the benefit of this filing date.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on September 4th, 2024 is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. accordingly, the information disclosure statement is being considered by the Examiner.
Response to Amendments and Arguments
With respect to 35 U.S.C. 112, Applicant amends to traverse the rejections raised in the previous Office Action.
Applicant’s arguments have been fully considered but are moot. While the Specification discloses "at least one processor to verify a first one of the physical items…" no associative detail is provided for the first and second networked devices and disclosed “data sources,” nor "the second networked device associated with an environment including the second one of the physical items." The Specification discloses a relation between the DAE (element 102) and various fields of endeavor, but provides no such distinction for the Data Sources (elements 104A and 104B) that are analogous to the claim's first and second networked devices. Further, no detail is disclosed that describes the Data Sources as embodied by networked devices. The nature and function of the networked devices is broadly claimed but not supported in the Specification, and the particular association between the networked devices and their respective environments is not disclosed. Accordingly, new rejections under 35 U.S.C. 112(a) are raised, commensurate with the amendments to the claims. Further details are provided below.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of the first paragraph of 35 U.S.C. 112(a):
(a) IN GENERAL.—The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor or joint inventor of carrying out the invention.
Claims 1-3, 5, 7-11, 13-18 and 20-21 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(a) as failing to comply with the written description requirement. The claims contain subject matter which was not described in the specification in such a way as to reasonably convey to one skilled in the relevant art that the inventor or a joint inventor at the time the application was filed, had possession of the claimed invention.
In claims 1, 9 and 16, limitations are included to “obtain a first string of data associated with a first physical item from a first networked device and obtain a second string of data associated with a second physical item from a second networked device, the second networked device associated with an environment including the second one of the physical items,” describing a distinguishing feature of a first and second networked device that is not disclosed in the Specification.
Paragraph [0028] discloses “As described above, examples disclosed herein may be implemented in any environment or circumstance in which text information is to be compared to determine a match or substantial parity. For instance, a physician order for a specific medication in a medical records database at a first time should be compared to text information on drug packaging (e.g., via camera scanner devices) at a second time before another medical professional administers the medication to a patient (e.g., in a hospital room of the patient),” paragraph [0032] discloses, “The environment 100 of FIG. 1A includes example data sources, such as an example first data source 104A and an example second data source 104B, which are communicatively coupled to the DAE 102 via an example network 106,” and paragraph [0065] discloses, “In some examples, each data sample is a linguistic sentence, phrase or word, such as a first sentence or phrase indicative of a prescription ordered by a physician at a first time during a consultation or exam. In some examples, prescriptions are stored in a medical facility database, such as the example first data source 104A of FIG. 1A.”
The Specification fails to illustrate any particular or preferred embodiment wherein the role of the data source is a particular device, such as a camera or a scanner, or that those devices are networked with the system as described for databases. Further, the Specification fails to illustrate any particular association with a real or virtual environment, to include physical items, with respect to any device, networked or otherwise.
Claims 2-3, 5, 6-8, 10-11, 13-15 and 17-18 and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(a) as being dependent upon claims rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(a).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1, 9 and 16 would be allowable if rewritten or amended to overcome the rejections under 35 U.S.C. 112(a) set forth in this Office Action. ELABORATE.
Claims 2-3, 5, 6-8, 10-11, 13-15 and 17-18 and 20 are objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable under amendments to overcome the rejections made in this Office Action.
The following is a statement of reasons for the indication of allowable subject matter:
WIPO Publication WO 2022/087497 to Miller and Peters teaches “analyzing product-related datasets using a computer system including a product data collection; receiving a product-related data submission; identifying system-identified terms in the submission; generating a query dataset comprising search elements, such as lexical vector(s), semantic vector(s), or both; querying the product data collection and identifying datasets that sufficiently match aspect(s) of the query dataset; comparing the content of the submission and matching datasets to provide an output such as a determination of an error or omission in the submission, identifying a relationship between the submission product and a product associated with an identified dataset; or assessing one or more product status characteristics,” (see Abstract) but does not rely on comparisons between information provided by a first and second device.
U.S. Patent Application Publication 2017/0132656 to Marcus teaches “receiving a scanned image of a paper purchase receipt. The receipt may have been submitted by a customer. A product indication is extracted from a line item in the receipt. A database of product purchase history data is accessed. The product purchase history data may be maintained for the customer. The accessing of the product history data is for retrieving past product purchase data for the customer. The retrieved past product purchase data may be used to identify a product indicated by the extracted product indication,” (see Abstract) including normalizing functions and scanning images for inputs, but does not describe a method relying on tokenization of input text, nor the lexical or semantic representations of that input text, nor a comparison between information provided by a first and second device.
U.S. Patent 10,007,658 to Anisimovich et al. teaches “performing a lexico-morphological analysis of a natural language text comprising a plurality of tokens, each token comprising at least one natural language word; determining, based on the lexico-morphological analysis, one or more lexical meanings and grammatical meanings associated with each token of the plurality of tokens; for each token the plurality of tokens, evaluating one or more classifier functions using the lexical and grammatical meanings associated with the tokens, wherein a value of each classifier function is indicative of a degree of association of the token with a category of named entities; performing a syntactico-semantic analysis of at least part of the natural language text to produce a plurality of semantic structures representing the part of the natural language text; and interpreting the semantic structures using a set of production rules to determine, for one or more tokens comprised by the part of the natural language text, a degree of association of the token with a category of named entities,” (see Abstract) including normalizing functions and scanning images for inputs, but does not teach comparison between information provided by a first and second device.
U.S. Patent Application Publication 2014/0337331 to Hassanzadeh et al. teaches a system for analyzing datasets, wherein each dataset contains “at least one data record, and each data record is associated with an entity and includes one or more attributes of that entity and a value for each attribute. Values associated with attributes are compared across datasets, and matching attributes having values that satisfy a predetermined similarity threshold are identified. In addition, linkage points between pairs of datasets are identified. Each linkage point links one or more pairs of data records. Each data record in the pair of data records is contained in one of a given pair of datasets, and each pair of data records is associated with a common entity having matching attributes in the given pair of datasets. Data records associated with the common entities are linked across datasets using the identified linkage points,” (see Abstract) but does not teach comparison between information provided by a first and second device.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure:
“A Dense Representation Framework for Lexical and Semantic Matching” by Lin et al.
“Attention is All You Need” by Vaswani et al.
“An Improved Model of Semantic Similarity Based on Lexical Co-Occurrence” by Rhode et al.
“Assessing Sentence Similarity Though Lexical, Syntactic and Semantic Analysis” by Ferreira et al.
“Automatic Generation of Probabilistic Relationships for Improving Schema Matching” by Po et al.
U.S. Patent 9,053,091 to Sarwar et al.
U.S. Patent 9,268,823 to Boyle et al.
U.S. Patent 11,568,142 to Dasgupta et al.
U.S. Patent 11,567,071 to Rywelska et al.
U.S. Patent Application Publication 2010/0172502 to Jones et al.
U.S. Patent Application Publication 2012/0290288 to Aït-Mokhtar.
U.S. Patent Application Publication 2018/0300668 to Farley et al.
U.S. Patent Application Publication 2020/0004875 to McAteer et al.
U.S. Patent Application Publication 2020/0089756 to Nelson et al.
U.S. Patent Application Publication 2021/0248192 to Lu et al.
U.S. Patent Application Publication 2022/0067085 to Nihas et al.
U.S. Patent Application Publication 2022/0253871 to Miller et al.
U.S. Patent Application Publication 2023/0015090 to Sharpe et al.
U.S. Patent Application Publication 2023/0034401 to Weston et al.
U.S. Patent Application Publication 2023/0267274 to Avadhani et al.
WIPO Publication WO 2019/051057 to Sorah et al.
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/SEAN THOMAS SMITH/Examiner, Art Unit 2659
/PIERRE LOUIS DESIR/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2659
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