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 .
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claims 1-10 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to a judicial exception (i.e., a law of nature, a natural phenomenon, or an abstract idea) without significantly more. The claims 1 and 9-10 are directed to the abstract idea of human organizing of activities.
Claims are drawn to a “sentence generation device”, the recited steps amount to collecting/acquiring operation information after a change, organizing/managing that information per unique equipment number, and generating a sentence to notify authorized persons based on their attributes. These are mental steps and certain methods of organizing human activity (coordinating operations and communications between people) that can be performed by a human dispatcher using pen and paper. The claim does not recite an inventive concept that amounts to significantly more than the abstract idea itself. The additional elements—generic memory and processor, and the notion of “transport equipment” and “authorized persons”—are recited at a high level of generality and perform only well understood, routine, and conventional computer functions: acquiring data, storing/managing data keyed by an identifier, and outputting notification text. The ordered combination of these elements is a conventional information processing pipeline that automates the long standing business practice of tracking equipment status and sending role specific notices, similar in kind to known notification systems that generate alerts and text messages based on changes in the status or location of tagged items. Accordingly, claims 1, 9 and 10 are directed to an abstract idea and fails to recite significantly more; it is therefore ineligible under 35 U.S.C. 101.
The claim(s) does/do not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception because the claims are (i) mere instructions to implement the idea on a computer, and/or (ii) recitation of generic computer structure that serves to perform generic computer functions that are well-understood, routine, and conventional activities previously known to the pertinent industry. Viewed as a whole, these additional claim element(s) do not provide meaningful limitation(s) to transform the abstract idea into a patent eligible application of the abstract idea such that the claim(s) amounts to significantly more than the abstract idea itself. Therefore, the claim(s) are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 as being directed to non-statutory subject matter. There is further no improvement to the computing device.
Dependent claims further recite an abstract idea performable by a human and do not amount to significantly more than the abstract idea as they do not provide steps other than what is conventionally known in long standing business practice of tracking equipment status.
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 (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) 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 the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for 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 and 5-10 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by JP 7289565 B2 (hereinafter JP’565).
Claims 1 and 9-10,
JP’565 teaches a sentence generation device, comprising: a memory storing instructions; and at least one processor configured to execute the instructions to ([Fig. 23] processor and memory for generating a notification of exchange of items):
acquire operation information after a change of transport equipment ([Fig. 23] recording a transaction which allow tracking of changes in ownership of a particular item);
manage the operation information for each unique number of the transport equipment ([Fig. 23] the transaction becomes part of the record that can be accessed to determine the status of ownership of the particular item); and
generate a sentence for notifying the operation information for each attribute of an authorized person relevant to an operation of the transport equipment with a unique number ([Figs. 11, 20 & 23-24 & 31] generating a notification signal which refer to a signal generated by a component of one system that is used to alert another person; the notification can appear as text on the display or in the report; text alert notification visual identifiers which include text describing the location, arrows pointing to the location, rack or shelf numbers, or any other data that may assist an individual to locate the location; the at least one processor interprets the relationship between the tag ID of the particular tag and at least one authorized entity associated with the recorded owner of the particular tag; an authorized entity is person or device that can be described as having a relationship to a particular tagged item or item associated with a tag).
Claim 5,
JP’565 further teaches the sentence generation device according to claim 1, wherein the at least one processor is further configured to execute the instructions to: transmit the sentence to a display device visually recognized by the authorized person ([Fig. 20] a graphical user interface to display information to the user).
Claim 6,
JP’565 further teaches the sentence generation device according to claim 1, wherein the at least one processor is further configured to execute the instructions to: manage the operation information for each of the authorized persons ([Two paragraphs above Fig. 1] to track information based on authenticate a person); and
generate a sentence for notifying schedule information of a predetermined authorized person based on the operation information managed for each of the authorized persons ([Fig. 23] generating a notification alert to alert another person; the notification can appear as text on the display or in the report).
Claim 7,
JP’565 further teaches the sentence generation device according to claim 6, wherein the at least one processor is further configured to execute the instructions to: transmit the sentence to a display device visually recognized by the authorized person ([Fig. 23] the notification can appear as text on the display to the authorized user);
receive a notification request for the schedule information from the display device that has transmitted the sentence ([Fig. 24] notification of scheduling);
generate a sentence for notifying the schedule information when receiving the notification request ([Figs. 23 & 24] notification of via text of the schedule); and
transmit the schedule information to a display device that is a transmission source of the notification request ([Fig. 23] display).
Claim 8,
JP’565 further teaches the sentence generation device according to claim 1, wherein the transport equipment is a rail vehicle, and the unique number is a vehicle number of the rail vehicle ([Two paragraphs above Fig. 1] vehicle tracking systems).
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.
Claim 2 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over JP’565 (JP 7289565 B2) and further in view of Kawasaki et al. (JP 2010266907).
Claim 2,
JP’565 teaches all the limitations in claim 1. The difference between the prior art and the claimed invention is that JP’565 does not explicitly teach wherein the at least one processor is further configured to execute the instructions to: extract notification information to be notified from the operation information for each attribute of the authorized person; and generate the sentence including the notification information.
Kawasaki teaches extract notification information to be notified from the operation information for each attribute of the authorized person ([Fig. 2] the operation information acquisition unit 2030 acquires the latest operation information from the operation management server 1070; The notification information creation means 2040 generates information to be provided to each user from the route information); and
generate the sentence including the notification information ([Fig. 2] the notification information distribution unit 2050 distributes the information generated by the notification information generation unit to the information terminal 1090 held by the user via the distribution server 1080).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, to modify the teachings of JP’565 with teachings of Kawasaki by modifying the wireless dual mode identification tag as taught by JP’565 to include wherein the at least one processor is further configured to execute the instructions to: extract notification information to be notified from the operation information for each attribute of the authorized person; and generate the sentence including the notification information as taught by Kawasaki for the benefit of providing information notification when a delay occurs (Kawasaki [Background-Art]).
Claims 3-4 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over JP’565 (JP 7289565 B2) in view of Kawasaki et al. (JP 2010266907) and further in view of Zeng et al. (CN 107526717).
Claim 3,
JP’565 and Kawasaki teach all the limitations in claim 2. The difference between the prior art and the claimed invention is that JP’565 nor Kawasaki explicitly teach generate the sentence using a machine learning model trained to generate a text based on an input text.
Zeng teaches generate the sentence using a machine learning model trained to generate a text based on an input text ([section 3. Natural language text generating module] BPMN process model, from the sentence, input text and other information, to generate natural language text providing sentence components, and ensure the consistency of the model text).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, to modify the teachings of JP’565 and Kawasaki with teachings of Zeng by modifying the wireless dual mode identification tag as taught by JP’565 to include generate the sentence using a machine learning model trained to generate a text based on an input text as taught by Zeng for the benefit of avoiding the loss of text information (Zeng [Section 3]).
Claim 4,
JP’565 and Kawasaki teach all the limitations in claim 2. The difference between the prior art and the claimed invention is that JP’565 nor Kawasaki explicitly teach acquire external information relevant to the notification information; and generate the sentence based on the notification information and the external information.
Zeng further teaches acquire external information relevant to the notification information ([After Fig. 11 and before Industrial-Applicability] acquiring information from another system); and
generate the sentence based on the notification information and the external information ([After Fig. 11 and before Industrial-Applicability] generating a notification information based on the another system information).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, to modify the teachings of JP’565 and Kawasaki with teachings of Zeng by modifying the wireless dual mode identification tag as taught by JP’565 to include generate the sentence using a machine learning model trained to generate a text based on an input text as taught by Zeng for the benefit of avoiding the loss of text information (Zeng [Section 3]).
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Bliss (US 2022/0129526) teaches which utilize digital tracking tags attached to data to monitor and/or control the data as it moves between applications and/or computing devices. The digital tracking tag may be embedded in the data (e.g., as a digital watermark) or associated with the data e.g., as metadata. In some examples, the digital tracking tag may include an address of a tracking database with which to record one or more events related to the data. For example, recipients, senders, or other participants in a data transfer event may register the data transfer event with the tracking database ([Abstract]).
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SHREYANS A. PATEL
Primary Examiner
Art Unit 2653
/SHREYANS A PATEL/ Examiner, Art Unit 2659