DETAILED ACTION
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 .
Continued Examination Under 37 CFR 1.114
A request for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, including the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e), was filed in this application after final rejection. Since this application is eligible for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114. Applicant's submission filed on 06/24/2026 has been entered.
Claims 1, 2, 7, 9, 12, 15, 17, and 20 have been amended and no claims have been added and/or canceled.
In light if Applicant’s amendment, previous claim rejections based on 35 USC 102 and 103 with respect to claims 1-20 have been withdrawn.
Double patenting has been checked with regard to patent # US 11,941,344.
Claims 1-20 are pending with claims 1, 12, and 17 as independent claims.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claims 1-5, 10-14, and 17-19 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Costenaro et al. (US 2012/0284344, published 11/8/2021, hereinafter as Costenaro) in view of Glover et al. (US 2016/0188584, hereinafter as Glover).
Claim 1. A non-transitory computer readable medium comprising instructions stored on the non-transitory computer readable medium, the instructions, when executed by a computing system, cause the computing system to:
receive, at a content management system, a first version of a content item; Costenaro discloses in [0069] “the document is accessed by opening an attachment to an electronic message to which changes are made by a recipient. The document may also be accessed by selecting a link within an electronic message and/or directly accessing the document at a shared location.” (emphasis added).
compare the first version of the content item and a second version of the content item to determine a difference; Costenaro discloses in [0070] “determine differences between original document at a first time and track changes as they are being made after that time”. And in [0077] “an application/process may keep track of the changes within the document, a difference comparison may be made between the current state of the document and a previous version of the document, and the like.” (emphasis added).
Costenaro does not explicitly disclose
determine an importance of the difference between the first version of the content item and the second version of the content item, based on at least one of: a degree of change between the first version of the content item and the second version of the content item corresponding to the difference, or a modified semantic meaning between the first version of the content item and the second version of the content item. However, Glover, in an analogous art, teaches in [claims 19-23] “determine if a first string comprising at least one detected change in a first version of a first document in the group meets a predetermined similarity test against a second string comprising the first version of a second document in the group; and in dependence on the determination, include in the output data presenting the detected change associated with the first string applied to the second string in the second document… where the predetermined similarity test is a match of the first string and second string… where the predetermined similarity test is a match of the first string and second string while ignoring at least spaces and punctuation… where the predetermined similarity test determines of the semantic meaning of the first string is sufficiently similar to the semantic meaning of the second string.” And in [0044] “The output formulation may further include a definition inconsistency detection module, capable of checking definitions found in different source documents. If the definitions detected for a single term differ between different documents (by more than trivialities such as whitespace or punctuation) then the inconsistency is highlighted to the user in an ‘inconsistent definitions’ category in the change summary tree.” (emphasis added) examiner note: inconsistency detected change may be determined as important while change in whitespace and punctuation may be determined as unimportant or trivial. Change in semantic meaning between string in the first version and string in the second version may also be detected.
a description of the importance of the difference. Also, Glover teaches in [0033 and 0044] “the categorization display option can provide a summary that can group together identical changes made in different documents (for example corrections to participant names or details) and highlight locations across the multiple documents where such changes have been neglected. Analysis of the changes in any individual document would be incapable of revealing if corrections had been made in 3 out of 4 documents but not the fourth. See FIG. 2. In the preferred embodiment, the default implementation of this categorized summary would involve all changes being shown in a consolidated tree view, with changes from different documents merged together but highlighted to indicate the document of origin, for instance… If the definitions detected for a single term differ between different documents (by more than trivialities such as whitespace or punctuation) then the inconsistency is highlighted to the user in an ‘inconsistent definitions’ category in the change summary tree.” (emphasis added) examiner note: the categorization of the summary to important changes and trivial changes may be description of the importance of the difference.
Accordingly, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to combine the teaching of Costenaro with the teaching of Glover because “When a group comparison is initiated, a corresponding set of comparisons can be made for each document in the plurality of documents comprising the transaction, whereby a later version of each constituent document in the set is compared to an earlier version. The resulting comparisons can be then presented to the user in one screen display or in one summary document so that the user can quickly review what changes are pending in the entire set of related documents. The invention addresses the problem that as the deal closes, there may be changes to several of the set of documents that are related or interact and therefore the personnel working the transaction would prefer the convenience of seeing the changes in all of the documents together.” Glover [Background].
generate, at the content management system, a summary of the difference between the first version of the content item and the second version of the content item with a description of the importance of the difference; further, Costenaro discloses in [0071] “a summary is created that summarizes the changes that are made to the document. The summary may be configured to include different information. For example, the summary may include all of the changes made to the document, a portion of the changes made to the document and/or statistical information relating to the changes to the document.” (emphasis added) examiner note: the summary of the change may be made to the document and statistical information relating to the change may be made to describe the degree of change as indicated by Glover above, and
send the summary to a client device. Costenaro discloses in [0072] “a determination is made as to what recipients are to receive the electronic message that includes the summary. Each reviewer on the document may receive the electronic message or a portion of the reviewers may receive the electronic message. For example, the electronic message may be sent to only the recipients that are authorized to collaborate on the section(s) of the document to which the changes were made.” (emphasis added).
Claim 2. The rejection of the non-transitory computer readable medium comprising the instructions of claim 1 is incorporated, Costenaro does not explicitly disclose wherein the summary comprises a description of an action leading to the difference and content of the first version of the content item affected by the action. However, Glover, in an analogous art, discloses in [0042] “As a result of identifying locations of definitions and section headings in the group of documents, a tooltip or hyperlink function can be inserted into the output display so that it may be activated for words/phrases matching the list of detected definitions or section headings. The tooltip text or hyperlink destination being the identified location of the definition in question. In this embodiment, the definition found in the changes can appear as hyperlinks to the locations in the original document, so the user can select on the highlighted or hyperlinked text in the displayed change, and a window pops up showing the definition in the original document or the section of the original document or the section referred to by the displayed change. In yet another embodiment, is that the system is adapted so that if the hyperlinked location itself has been changed, that system presents the changed version automatically.” (emphasis added).
Accordingly, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to combine the teaching of Costenaro with the teaching of Glover because “When a group comparison is initiated, a corresponding set of comparisons can be made for each document in the plurality of documents comprising the transaction, whereby a later version of each constituent document in the set is compared to an earlier version. The resulting comparisons can be then presented to the user in one screen display or in one summary document so that the user can quickly review what changes are pending in the entire set of related documents. The invention addresses the problem that as the deal closes, there may be changes to several of the set of documents that are related or interact and therefore the personnel working the transaction would prefer the convenience of seeing the changes in all of the documents together.” Glover [Background].
Claim 3. The rejection of the non-transitory computer readable medium comprising the instructions of claim 1 is incorporated, the instructions when executed by the computing system, cause the computing system to:
Costenaro does not explicitly disclose receive, at the content management system, the second version of the content item. However, Glover, in an analogous art, discloses in [0018] “the system can be configured to use logical criteria to select files automatically. In one embodiment, the system can receive an alphanumeric string that is the name of a transaction. Using that string, the system can search file folder names that contain the string or sufficiently match the string. In other cases, the folder may contain sub-folders that contain relevant documents. Once the folders are identified, the system can check filenames in the folder to determine the set of documents and constituent document versions. In some cases, this requires string matching on the file names.” (emphasis added) examiner note: the constituent versions may be a second version to be received by the system.
Accordingly, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to combine the teaching of Costenaro with the teaching of Glover because “When a group comparison is initiated, a corresponding set of comparisons can be made for each document in the plurality of documents comprising the transaction, whereby a later version of each constituent document in the set is compared to an earlier version. The resulting comparisons can be then presented to the user in one screen display or in one summary document so that the user can quickly review what changes are pending in the entire set of related documents. The invention addresses the problem that as the deal closes, there may be changes to several of the set of documents that are related or interact and therefore the personnel working the transaction would prefer the convenience of seeing the changes in all of the documents together.” Glover [Background].
Claims 4, 13, and 18. The rejection of the non-transitory computer readable medium comprising the instructions of claim 3 is incorporated, the instructions, when executed by the computing system, cause the computing system to:
transfer, the first version of the content item and the second version of the content item to a comparison module, wherein the comparison module compares the first version of the content item and the second version of the content item. Costenaro discloses in [0077-0078] “Many different methods may be used for determining the changes… an application/process may keep track of the changes within the document, a difference comparison may be made between the current state of the document and a previous version of the document, and the like… statistics relating to the document changes are determined. Many different types of statistics may be determined. For example, number of characters changed, words changed, lines changed, paragraphs changed, sections changed, pages changed, comments added, highlighting added/removed, pictures inserted/deleted, tables inserted/deleted, formatting changes, and the like.” (emphasis added).
Claims 5, 14, and 19. The rejection of the non-transitory computer readable medium comprising the instructions of claim 4 is incorporated, the instructions, when executed by the computing system, cause the computing system to:
identify, by the comparison module, the difference between the first version of the content item and second version of the content item. Costenaro discloses in [0077-0078] “Many different methods may be used for determining the changes… an application/process may keep track of the changes within the document, a difference comparison may be made between the current state of the document and a previous version of the document, and the like… statistics relating to the document changes are determined. Many different types of statistics may be determined. For example, number of characters changed, words changed, lines changed, paragraphs changed, sections changed, pages changed, comments added, highlighting added/removed, pictures inserted/deleted, tables inserted/deleted, formatting changes, and the like.” (emphasis added) examiner note: highlighting added/removed, pictures inserted/deleted, tables inserted/deleted or formatting changes may indicate identifying differences.
Claim 10. The rejection of the non-transitory computer readable medium comprising the instructions of claim 1 is incorporated, wherein the summary incorporates comments provided by an author. Costenaro discloses in [0055] “A comment section (e.g. comment section 516) allows a user to insert a comment next to the change that is made to the document.” (emphasis added).
Claim 11. The rejection of the non-transitory computer readable medium comprising the instructions of claim 1 is incorporated, Costenaro does not explicitly disclose wherein metadata is used to compare the first version of the content item and second version of the content item. However, Glover discloses in[0042-0044] “As a result of identifying locations of definitions and section headings in the group of documents, a tooltip or hyperlink function can be inserted into the output display so that it may be activated for words/phrases matching the list of detected definitions or section headings. The tooltip text or hyperlink destination being the identified location of the definition in question. In this embodiment, the definition found in the changes can appear as hyperlinks to the locations in the original document, so the user can select on the highlighted or hyperlinked text in the displayed change, and a window pops up showing the definition in the original document or the section of the original document or the section referred to by the displayed change. In yet another embodiment, is that the system is adapted so that if the hyperlinked location itself has been changed, that system presents the changed version automatically.” (emphasis added) examiner note: the section headings may be metadata describe changes between compared document and document versions.
Accordingly, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to combine the teaching of Costenaro with the teaching of Glover because “When a group comparison is initiated, a corresponding set of comparisons can be made for each document in the plurality of documents comprising the transaction, whereby a later version of each constituent document in the set is compared to an earlier version. The resulting comparisons can be then presented to the user in one screen display or in one summary document so that the user can quickly review what changes are pending in the entire set of related documents. The invention addresses the problem that as the deal closes, there may be changes to several of the set of documents that are related or interact and therefore the personnel working the transaction would prefer the convenience of seeing the changes in all of the documents together.” Glover [Background].
Claim 12. The claim is directed towards a method for implementing the steps of claim 1, therefore, is similarly rejected as claim 1.
Claim 17. The claim is directed towards a system to implement the steps of claim 1, therefore, is similarly rejected as claim 1. Further, Costenaro discloses one or more processors; and a non-transitory computer readable medium storing processor instructions in [claim 17] “a processor, memory, and a computer-readable storage medium; an operating environment stored on the computer-readable storage medium and executing on the processor”. (emphasis added).
Claim 6 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Costenaro and Glover as applied to claim 1 above, and further in view of Poletto et al. (US 2015/0244794, published 8/27/2015, hereinafter as Poletto).
Claim 6. The rejection of the non-transitory computer readable medium comprising the instructions of claim 4 is incorporated, the instructions, when executed by the computing system, cause the computing system to:
Costenaro does not explicitly disclose assign, by the comparison module, a similarity score to the first version of the content item and the second version of the content item. However, Poletto discloses in [0107] “Organization module 136 may be used to identify similar content items for clusters in order to organize content items for presentation within user interfaces on user devices 102 and content management system 104. Similarity rules may be defined to create one or more numeric representations embodying information on similarities between each of the content items in accordance with various similarity rules. Organization module 136 may use numeric representations as a reference for similarity between content items in order to cluster the content items.” (emphasis added) examiner note: the numeric representations as a reference for similarity may be similarity measures indicating similarity score.
Accordingly, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to combine the teaching of Costenaro with the teaching of Poletto because “if there is a low level of connectivity between the device and the server, the user may not be able to send content to the server or share content with one or more contacts. This can be frustrating and troublesome for the user because they may desire to interact with their content without any constraints despite any limitations that may be outside of their control (e.g., low connectivity/signal). Thus, it would be beneficial for there to be systems and methods that provide a user with a set of interactivity features locally on their user device.” Poletto [Background].
Claims 7 and 15 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Costenaro, Glover, and Poletto as applied to claims 1 and 6 above, and further in view of Nielsen (US 5,890,164).
Claims 7 and 15. The rejection of the non-transitory computer readable medium comprising the instructions of claim 5 is incorporated, the instructions, when executed by the computing system, cause the computing system to:
Costenaro does not explicitly disclose
determine the importance of the difference based on the degree of change by determining at least one of a relative size of the change compared to the first version of the content item or an absolute size of the change to the first version of the content item. However, Nielsen, in an analogous art, teaches in [claim 5] “comparing word counts includes deriving a change estimate by determining the absolute value of the difference between a first word count at the time a user last viewed the file and a second word count at the time of access and dividing that absolute value by the maximum of the first word count and the second word count.” (emphasis added) examiner note: calculating the change estimate based on dividing word count based on time of the document version was last seen and the word count at the time of access would indicate the relative size of change to show much the document version has changed or the degree of change between the document version before the change and after the change.
Accordingly, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to combine the teaching of Costenaro with the teaching of Nielsen because “Users are faced with increasing information overload, especially when using the worldwide web portion of the internet (WWW) which has hundreds of thousands of web sites and millions of web pages. Users often wish to monitor an information source, such as a web page, for changing information but do not have time to manually look at the source at regular intervals… provide a monitoring mechanism that informs users when a web page in which they are interested has changed and indicates how much it has changed.” Nielsen [Background].
Claims 8-9, 16, and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Costenaro, Glover, Poletto, and Nielsen as applied to claims 1 and 7 above, and further in view of Bernard et al. (US 2003/0135607, published 7/17/2003, hereinafter as Bernard).
Claims 8, 16, and 20. The rejection of the non-transitory computer readable medium comprising the instructions of claim 7 is incorporated, Costenaro does not explicitly disclose wherein the comparison module uses machine learning to determine the importance of the difference between the first version of the content item and the second version of the content item. However, Bernard, in an analogous art, discloses in [0012] “a document monitoring agent that saves a record of all document versions that correspond to "important" or "significant" changes to networked documents, as evaluated by users.” And in [0039] “Recommender systems are able to provide personalized recommendations that take into account similarities between people based on their user profiles. An example of a recommender system is known from the Alexa Internet site (URL: http://www.alexa.com). Such system provides a list of recommended web pages worth viewing based on some predetermined filtering criteria… Recommender systems learn their users' tastes and recommend items to users by first matching users to each other by way of user profiles.” And in [0040] “it is even possible to combine recommender systems with monitoring agents as described, e.g. in the document EP-A-1 050 831, in the name of the present assignee, and thus also with the present agent.” And in [0042] “Profiler agents track and map each user's interests, learning more about the person each time (s)he uses KP. A recommender agent finds matches between new items and user preferences, automatically sending relevant and high quality information to people as it is found.” (emphasis added) examiner note: the document monitoring agent may be a machine learning module (recommender agent) because it learns people preferences such as significant change for a version of a document.
Accordingly, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to combine the teaching of Costenaro with the teaching of Bernard in order to “track only changes significant to subscribers and filters out automatically detected changes that are of no interest.” Bernard [0010].
Claim 9. The rejection of the non-transitory computer readable medium comprising the instructions of claim 7 is incorporated, Costenaro does not explicitly disclose wherein the comparison module uses natural language processing to determine the importance of the difference between the first version of the content item and the second version of the content item. However, Bernard, in an analogous art, discloses in [0012] “a document monitoring agent that saves a record of all document versions that correspond to "important" or "significant" changes to networked documents, as evaluated by users.” And in [0030-0032] “The monitoring agent 102 monitors document changes by periodically accessing the document. In this case, the monitoring agent 102 is responsible for detecting the change and therefore associates with the document identifier a record of information representing the state of the document. Such information is stored in document content representation storage 104. The monitoring agent 102 detects changes by comparing successive records. The information recorded may range from the whole document content to a document content checksum of only a few bytes. The relevance and efficiency of the change detection derives directly from the sort of record(s) (or combination thereof) that is used.” (emphasis added) examiner note: the document monitoring agent may be a natural language processing module (recommender agent) because it processes the content of the document and identify whether the change is significant or not according to the subscriber preferences.
Accordingly, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to combine the teaching of Costenaro with the teaching of Bernard in order to “track only changes significant to subscribers and filters out automatically detected changes that are of no interest.” Bernard [0010].
Response to Arguments
Applicant’s arguments with respect to claims 1, 12, and 17 have been considered but are moot because the new ground of rejection does not rely on any reference applied in the prior rejection of record for any teaching or matter specifically challenged in the argument.
Argument: Applicant argues “As agreed during the interview, the cited art does not describe, teach, or suggest all of the features recited by the currently amended independent claims. For example, Costenaro, whether considered singly or in combination with the other cited references, fails to describe, teach, or suggest each limitation recited by independent claims 1, 12, and 17… Costenaro makes no mention of detecting a second change within the aforementioned character changes, word changes, line changes, etc. Thus, Costenaro fails to disclose, teach, or suggest "identify[ing] a second difference nested within the first difference by comparing sub-portions of the first portion matched to the second portion of the content item," as recited by the currently amended independent claims 1, 12, and 17.” (emphasis added).
Response: Applicant argues that Costenaro fails to disclose, teach, or suggest amendment to independent claims 1, 12, and 17. However, independent claims do not recite the amendment that had been suggested in the interview such as the limitation emphasized above.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure. See PTO-892.
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/AHAMED I NAZAR/Examiner, Art Unit 2178 6/27/2026
/STEPHEN S HONG/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2178
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