Detailed Action
Applicant amended claims 1, 7-11 and 17-18, canceled claims 19-20 and presented claims 1-18 for reconsideration on 02/12/2026.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 102 that forms the basis for all the rejections under this section made in this Office Action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless—
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claims 1-2, 6, 11-12 and 16 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) as being anticipated by Williams et al., Pub. No.: US 20190347668 A1 (Williams).
Claim 1. Williams teaches:
A method, comprising:
accessing, by one or more processors, a plurality of customer relationship management (CRM) record objects of one or more CRM systems of record, each CRM record object of the plurality of CRM record objects comprising one or more object field-value pairs, the one or more CRM systems of record associated with one or more data source providers; (¶¶ 115, 102-123, proprietary databases are utilized for identifying entities and relationships: ¶ 115, “the methods and systems disclosed herein include methods and systems for pulling information at scale from one or more information sources…the crawling system 202 may obtain information from external information sources 230 accessible via a communication network 280 (e.g., the Internet), a private network, a proprietary database 208 (such as a content management system, a customer relationship management database, a sales database, a marketing database, a service management database, or the like), or other suitable information sources”; ¶ 123, “the information extraction system 204 may utilize one or more proprietary databases 208 to assist in identifying entities, events, and/or relationships…the proprietary databases 208 may include one or more databases that power a content relationship management system…, where the database stores structured data relating to leads, customers, products, and/or other data relating to an organization or individual. This structured data may indicate, for example, names of customer companies and potential customer companies, contact points at customer companies and potential customer companies, employees of a company, when a sale was made to a company (or individual) by another company, emails that were sent to a particular lead from a company and dates of the emails, and other relevant data pertaining to a CRM. In these embodiments, the information extraction system 204 may utilize the data stored in the proprietary databases 208 to identify entities, relationships, and/or events; to confirm entities, relationships, or events; and/or to refute identifications of entities, relationships, and/or events”)
identifying, by the one or more processors, from a CRM record object of the plurality of CRM record objects corresponding to a first group entity, an account relationship data structure field-value pair of the CRM record object, the account relationship data structure field-value pair specifying a relationship type value specifying a relationship between the first group entity and a respective second group entity, wherein the account relationship data structure field-value pair is populated based on data from the one or more CRM systems of record, wherein the first group entity is a first company, wherein the respective second group entity is a respective second company; (¶¶ 120-123, information, e.g., relationship and relationship type related to entities such as company A and company B is identified and stored and further the stored information is updated based on an identified change in relationship: “an entity classification models may be able to extract “Company A” and “Company B” as business organization entities because the classification model may have learned that the term “deal to acquire” is a language pattern that is typically associated with two companies. Furthermore, an event classification model may identify a “company acquisition event” based on the text because the event classification model may have learned that the term “deal to acquire” is closely associated with “company acquisition events.” Furthermore, the event classification model may rely on the terms “Company A” and “Company B” to strengthen the classification, especially if both Company A and Company B are both entities that are known to the system 200. In embodiments, the information extraction system 204 may derive new relationships between two or more entities from a newly identified event. For example, in response to the news article indicating Company A has acquired Company B, the information extraction system 204 may infer a new relationship that Company A owns Company B. In this example, a natural language processor may process the text to determine that Company A is the acquirer and Company B is the acquisition. Using the event classification of “company acquisition event” and the results of the natural language processing, the information extraction module 204 may infer that Company B now owns Company A. The information extraction system 204 may extract additional information from the news article, such as a date of the acquisition”))
identifying, by the one or more processors, a first group node profile corresponding to the first group entity, the first group node profile including one or more node field-value pairs corresponding to the one or more object field-value pairs of the record object corresponding to the first group entity; (see above)
identifying, by the one or more processors, for the respective second group entity, a corresponding second group node profile including node field-value pairs generated using object field-value pairs of second record objects of a second group entity maintained by the one or more CRM systems of record; (see above)
detecting, by the one or more processors, a change in the relationship type value of that account relationship data structure, the change indicating that the relationship between the first group entity and the respective second group entity has been updated from a first relationship type to a second relationship type; and (see above)
updating, by the one or more processors, the first group node profile based on detecting the change in the relationship type value of the account relationship data structure. (see above, “the information extraction system 204 may derive new relationships between two or more entities from a newly identified event. For example, in response to the news article indicating Company A has acquired Company B, the information extraction system 204 may infer a new relationship that Company A owns Company B. In this example, a natural language processor may process the text to determine that Company A is the acquirer and Company B is the acquisition. Using the event classification of “company acquisition event” and the results of the natural language processing, the information extraction module 204 may infer that Company B now owns Company A. The information extraction system 204 may extract additional information from the news article, such as a date of the acquisition”)
Claim 11 is rejected under the same rationale as above.
Claim 2. The method of claim 1, wherein detecting the change in the relationship type value further comprises detecting the change in the relationship type value from a communication pattern among one or more electronic activities identifying participants corresponding to the first group entity or the second group entity. (¶¶ 121-123, “the information extraction system 204 may use the language patterns to extract various forms of information, including but not limited to entities, entity attributes, relationships between respective entities and/or respective events, events, event types, attributes of events from the obtained documents…the information extraction system 204 may utilize one or more proprietary databases 208 to assist in identifying entities, events, and/or relationships. In embodiments, the proprietary databases 208 may include one or more databases that power a content relationship management system (not shown), where the database stores structured data relating to leads, customers, products, and/or other data relating to an organization or individual. This structured data may indicate, for example, names of customer companies and potential customer companies, contact points at customer companies and potential customer companies, employees of a company, when a sale was made to a company (or individual) by another company, emails that were sent to a particular lead from a company and dates of the emails, and other relevant data pertaining to a CRM”)
Claim 12 is rejected under the same rationale as claim 2.
Claim 6. The method of claim 1, wherein detecting the change in the relationship type value further comprises detecting the change by applying a natural language processing algorithm on one or more electronic activities to extract a feature indicating the change. (¶ 121, “The information extraction system 204 may utilize natural language processing and/or machine learned classification models (e.g., neural networks) to identify entities, events, and relationships from one or more parsed documents)
Claim 16 is rejected under the same rationale as above.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
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 of this title, 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 3-4, 7-9, 13-14 and 17-18 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103(a) as being unpatentable over William as applied to claims above, in view of Mahalingam et al., Pub. No.: US 2019/0236199 (Mahalingam).
Claim 3. William did not specifically teach but Mahalingam teaches:
The method of claim 1, wherein detecting the change in the relationship type value further comprises detecting the change in the relationship type value including a modification of an address in electronic activities identifying participants corresponding to the first group entity or the second group entity. (Mahalingam, ¶¶ 36, 38 43, wherein based on participant ID and the domain ID, a modified address is detected in ¶ 43, and a relationship type corresponding to an address is updated as in ¶¶ 24, 34, 43)
William ¶ 117 discloses utilizing various type of information regarding entities, events, and relationships. It would have been obvious before the effective filling date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to combine the applied references for disclosing wherein detecting the change in the relationship type value further comprises detecting the change in the relationship type value including a modification of an address in electronic activities identifying participants corresponding to the first group entity or the second group entity because doing so would provide for an explicit disclosure of utilizing extracted information such as modification of an address in electronic activates for achieving the same predictable result as William disclosed.
Claim 13 is rejected under the same rationale as above.
Claim 4. The method of claim 1, wherein detecting the change in the relationship type value further comprises detecting a change in a domain name corresponding to the first group entity or the respective second group entity. (Mahalingam, ¶ 34, wherein a change in a domain name is detected by detecting “a new email address or phone number of an existing user of an existing user object”)
Claim 14 is rejected under the same rationale as above.
Claim 7. The method of claim 1, wherein detecting the change in the relationship type value further comprises detecting a change in the account relationship data structure field-value pair specifying the relationship among the group entities from the CRM record object of the plurality of CRM record objects corresponding to the first group entity. (Williams, ¶¶ 115, 102-123; Mahalingam, ¶¶ 34, 36, 38, 43-44, a change in relationship type is determined withing a group: “if a particular participant ID matches an owner ID or a user member ID of a member of a user group (e.g., a team member) of a particular task of the matching entity object, at least one attribute of the corresponding user object may be updated”)
Claim 17 is rejected under the same rationale as above.
Claim 8. The method of claim 1, wherein detecting the change in the relationship type value further comprises detecting a change in a second account relationship data structure field-value pair of a second CRM record object of the plurality of the plurality of CRM record objects corresponding to the respective second group entity. (Williams, ¶¶ 115, 102-123; Mahalingam, ¶¶ 36, 38, 40, 47, participant IDs and owner ID of an entity including a second entity is matched for identifying a relationships and records are updated/modified based on the identified relationship using participant IDs)
Claim 18 is rejected under the same rationale as above.
Claim 9. The method of claim 1, further comprising providing, by the one or more processors, in response to updating, the relationship type value to populate a CRM record object of the plurality of CRM record objects corresponding to the respective second group entity. (Williams, ¶¶ 115, 102-123; Mahalingam, ¶¶ 36, 38, 40, 47, participant IDs and owner ID of an entity including a second entity is matched for identifying a relationships and records are updated/modified based on the identified relationship using participant IDs)
Claims 5 and 15 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103(a) as being unpatentable over Williams as applied to claims above, in view of Gao et al., Patent No.: US 11,232,111 (Gao).
Claim 5. The method of claim 1, wherein detecting the change in the relationship type further comprises detecting a redirection of a website corresponding to the first group entity or the second group entity.
Williams taught all features as disclosed in this claim as shown in claim 1 except detecting the change including a redirection of a website corresponding to the first group entity or the second group entity.
Gao teaches detecting the change including a redirection of a website corresponding to the first group entity or the second group entity by detecting a redirection of a website corresponding to a company using a company matching system and generating a signature for the company which includes the “resolved website or domain if there is a redirect” and based on the detected redirection, information of the company in a CRM database is updated. Gao, col. 9, ll. 49-62.
It would have been obvious before the effective filling date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to combine the applied references for disclosing detecting the change including a redirection of a website corresponding to the first group entity or the second group entity because doing so would further increase usability of Williams by detecting a redirection of a website corresponding to a company and updating the information related to the company by its resolved website or domain.
Claim 15 is rejected under the same rationale as above.
Response to Amendment and Arguments
Applicant’s arguments with respect to amended claims have been fully considered but are moot in view of the new ground of rejections as provided above.
Conclusion
Applicant’s amendment necessitated the new ground(s) of rejection presented in this office action. Accordingly, THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. See MPEP § 706.07(a). Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any extension fee pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Mohsen Almani whose telephone number is (571)270-7722. The examiner can normally be reached on M-F, 9 AM-5 PM, ET.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Ann J. Lo can be reached on 571-272-9767. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/MOHSEN ALMANI/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2159
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