DETAILED ACTION
Remarks
The instant application having Application Number 19/110,291 filed on March 10, 2025 has a total of 19 claims pending in the application; there are 3 independent claims and 16 dependent claims, all of which are presented for examination by the examiner.
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
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.
Examiner Notes
Examiner cites particular columns and line numbers in the references as applied to the claims below for the convenience of the applicant. Although the specified citations are representative of the teachings in the art and are applied to the specific limitations within the individual claim, other passages and figures may apply as well. It is respectfully requested that, in preparing responses, the applicant fully consider the references in entirety as potentially teaching all or part of the claimed invention, as well as the context of the passage as taught by the prior art or disclosed by the examiner.
The examiner requests, in response to this Office action, supports are shown for language added to any original claims on amendment and any new claims. That is, indicate support for newly added claim language by specifically pointing to page(s) and line no(s) in the specification and/or drawing figure(s). This will assist the examiner in prosecuting the application.
When responding to this office action, Applicant is advised to clearly point out the patentable novelty which he or she thinks the claims present, in view of the state of the art disclosed by the references cited or the objections made. He or she must also show how the amendments avoid such references or objections See 37 CFR 1.111(c).
Information Disclosure Statement
As required by M.P.E.P. 609(C), the applicant’s submissions of the Information Disclosure Statements dated March 10, 2025 is acknowledged by the examiner and the cited references have been considered in the examination of the claims now pending. As required by M.P.E.P 609 C (2), a copy of the PTOL-1449 initialed and dated by the examiner is attached to the instant office action.
Drawings
The applicant’s drawings submitted are acceptable for examination purposes.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of the second paragraph of 35 U.S.C. 112:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
Claims 21-40 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor, or for pre-AIA the applicant regards as the invention. Claims 21, 38 and 40 are vague and indefinite because the phrase "geometric footprint" and “buffered query object” have not been clearly defined in the claim. Although the claims are interpreted in light of the specification, limitations from the specification are not read into the claims. See In re Van Geuns, 988 F.2d 1181, 26 USPQ2d 1057 (Fed. Cir.1993). Therefore, one of ordinary skill in the art would not be able to ascertain the metes and bounds of the claimed invention. Applicants need not confine themselves to the terminology used in the prior art, but are required to make clear and precise the terms that are used to define the invention whereby the metes and bounds of the claimed invention can be ascertained. See MPEP 2173.05(a)(I). Appropriate correction is required.
The Examiner has given the phrases "geometric footprint" and “buffered query object” there broadest reasonable interpretation. For examination purposes, all claim interpretation is predicated upon the broadest reasonable interpretation of the claim terms which would be fairly conveyed to one of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
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 38-39 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter. Claim 38 lacks the necessary physical articles or objects to constitute a machine or a manufacture within the meaning of 35 USC 101.
Claim 38 is directed towards software per se because it is merely software modules (i.e., units) without any physical components (such as memory, processor etc.) to represent the system. Software per se, which is not patent eligible subject matter since it does not contain any structure that would allow it to be either a manufacture, machine, or composition of matter.
All claims dependent thereon, namely claim 39, fail to remedy these deficiencies, and are rejected for at least the same reasons.
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 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.
The factual inquiries set forth in Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1, 148 USPQ 459 (1966), that are applied for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or nonobviousness.
Claims 21-40 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Martin Werner et al. ("BACR: Set Similarities with Lower Bounds and Application to Spatial Trajectories" by Martin Werner, SIGSPATIAL ’15, November 03-06, 2015, ‘Martin’, hereafter) in view of Xie et al. (US Patent Publication No. 2005/0055376 A1, ‘Xie’, hereafter).
Regarding claim 21. Martin teaches a computer-implemented method for range query processing of complex geometric data in a database with respect to a query distance to a query object (Abstract, lines 1-3, "This paper proposes a length-independent feature representation of sets of strings based on Bloom filters called BACR for similarity search in databases."; page 3, section 3, lines 1-4, "The idea behind BACR is to use the memory-efficiency of Bloom filters in order to increase the amount of data that can be processed in memory for specific queries and distance functions ..."; page 4, section 4.1, lines 1-4, "A BACR representation of a trajectory supports a subset query. This query is directly supported for two types of query objects: a trajectory (alternatively any set of points) or a BACR representation of a trajectory."), said method comprising the steps of:
determining a buffered query object with respect to the query object (page 2, section 2.4, lines 1-3, "One of the most important operations in similarity search is the nearest neighbor search in which the nearest neighbor of a query object q in a collection of objects C is to be found."),
determining a buffered query filter for the buffered query object using a filter function, wherein the filter function comprises determining a mapping of an overlapped cell of a grid to a corresponding element of the buffered query filter, the overlapped cell being overlapped by the buffered query object on the grid (page 2, section 2, lines 2-5, "Then, we explain the Bloom filter data structure. Further, we explain Z-curve codings, a technique based on a space-filling curve with which geometric points can be transformed into strings and with which we discretize geometric or spatial components of the given trajectories."; page 2, section 2.1 lines 7-9, "Thirdly, a regular grid is being used in order to reduce the complexities induced by good indexing structures for points."; page 2, section 2.3, lines 1-3, "The process of mapping coordinates in some d-dimensional space into strings amounts to a mapping of the d-dimensional space onto a one-dimensional discrete space."; page 5, section 5.2, lines 7-10, "The intersection query can be used to find, for example, all trajectories that have a certain spatial overlap with each other measured by the number of cells in their instruction”);
filtering out complex geometric data objects in the database for which the filter function generates corresponding filter objects, which are not a subset of the buffered query filter or which have an empty intersection with the buffered query filter (page 3, section 3, lines 1-4, "The idea behind BACR is to use the memory-efficiency of Bloom filters in order to increase the amount of data that can be processed in memory for specific queries and distance functions ..."; page 5, section 5.2, lines 7-10, "The intersection query can be used to find, for example, all trajectories that have a certain spatial overlap with each other measured by the number of cells in their intersection.”; page 7, right column, lines 12-13, "Some sets will be completely unrelated having an empty intersection.").
Martin does not teach
wherein a geometric footprint of the buffered query object is increased with respect to the query object based on the query distance;
However, Xie teaches
wherein a geometric footprint of the buffered query object is increased with respect to the query object based on the query distance (The SDO_GEORASTER object contains a spatial extent geometry 102 (footprint or coverage extent) and relevant metadata, which are organized in a XML document according to the provided XML Schema. A table containing one or more columns of this object type is called a GeoRaster table. The SDO_RASTER object contains information about a block (tile) of a GeoRaster object, and it uses a BLOB object to store the raster cell data for the block, Xie [0047]);
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention was made having the teachings of Martin and Xie before him/her, to modify Martin with the teaching of Xie’s georaster physical data model for storing georeferenced raster data. One would have been motivated to do so for the benefit of allowing users of file-based image processing and raster data applications to benefit from the scalability, security and performance of DBMSs to support the mission critical applications (Xie, Abstract, [0008]).
Regarding claim 22. Martin as modified teaches, wherein the query object is a complex geometric object, which comprises a collection of points or edges (Martin, page 4, section 4.1).
Regarding claim 23. Martin as modified teaches, wherein the buffered query object approximates the set of points for which the smallest distance to the query object is smaller or equal to the query distance at least for a portion of the query object (Martin, page 2, section 2.4).
Regarding claim 24. Martin as modified teaches, wherein the buffered query object geometrically approximates a sleeve around the query object, wherein the geometric boundary of the sleeve is spaced by the query distance from the query object (Martin, page 2, section 2.4).
Regarding claim 25. Martin as modified teaches, wherein determining the buffered query filter comprises determining a rasterized sketch of the buffered query object by determining cells of the grid which are overlapped by the buffered query object (Martin, page 6, section 6).
Regarding claim 26. Martin as modified teaches, wherein the grid comprises a grid of a geographic surface or a geographic volume (Martin, page 2, left column).
Regarding claim 27. Martin as modified teaches, wherein cells of the grid are associated with respective geographic locations (Martin, page 2, left column).
Regarding claim 28. Martin as modified teaches, wherein each cell of the grid is associated with an interval of latitude coordinates and an interval of longitude coordinates (Martin, page 2, left column).
Regarding claim 29. Martin as modified teaches, wherein the cell of the grid is identified by a geographical identifier through a hashing function (Martin, page 4, section 4.1).
Regarding claim 30. Martin as modified teaches, wherein the filter function maps the geographical identifier associated with the overlapped cell or an identifier based on the geographical identifier to the element of the buffered filter function (Martin, page 4, section 4.1).
Regarding claim 31. Martin as modified teaches, wherein the method further comprises determining, for each cell of the grid overlapped by the buffered query object, the mapping to the corresponding element of the buffered query filter, and updating the buffered query filter based on the result of the mapping (Martin, page 2, section 2.3).
Regarding claim 32. Martin as modified teaches, wherein updating the buffered query filter comprises setting a bit of the buffered query filter, if the bit had not been set earlier (Martin, page 2, section 2.1 and page 5, section 5.2).
Regarding claim 33. Martin as modified teaches, wherein the mapping of the cell of the grid overlapped by the buffered query object to the element of the buffered query filter comprises calculating a hash function of an identifier which is associated with the cell overlapped by the buffered query object (Martin, page 2, section 2.1 and page 5, section 5.2).
Regarding claim 34. Martin as modified teaches, wherein the method further comprises determining an index of the buffered query filter based on the output of the hash function (Martin, page 2, section 2.1 and page 5, section 5.2).
Regarding claim 35. Martin as modified teaches, wherein the mapping is non-injective and allows for collisions of the output of the mapping with respect to the expected input based on the database or the query object (Martin, page 5, section 5.2, page 9, section 7.2, left column).
Regarding claim 36. Martin as modified teaches, wherein the filter function comprises determining a plurality of elements of the buffered query filter for each overlapped cell (Martin, page 4, section 4.1 and page 5, section 5.2).
Regarding claim 37. Martin as modified teaches, wherein the buffered query filter is a Bloom filter for the buffered query object based on the cells of the grid overlapped by the buffered query object (Martin, page 4, section 4.1 and page 5, section 5.2).
Regarding claim 38, although claim 38 directed to a system, it is similar in scope to claim 1. The method steps of claim 1 substantially encompass the system recited in claim 38. Therefore; claim 38 is rejected for at least the same reason as claim 1 above.
Regarding claim 39, Martin as modified teaches, wherein the database is configured to generate or maintain filter objects for each of the complex geometric data objects held in the database using the filter function in advance (Martin, page 3, section 3, lines 1-4, page 5, section 5.2, lines 7-10, page 7, right column, lines 12-13).
Regarding claim 40. Martin as modified teaches a computer program comprising machine readable instructions, which when the computer program is executed by a processing unit (a database management system (DBMS) 1100, in which the present invention may be implemented, is shown in FIG. 11. DBMS 1100 is typically a programmed general-purpose computer system, such as a personal computer, workstation, server system, and minicomputer or mainframe computer. DBMS 1100 includes one or more processors (CPUs) 1102A-1102N, input/output circuitry 1104, network adapter 1106, and memory 1108. CPUs 1102A-1102N execute program instructions in order to carry out the functions of the present invention, Xie [0142-0144]) cause the processing unit to:
although claim 40 directed to a program, it is similar in scope to claim 21. The method steps of claim 21 substantially encompass the program recited in claim 40. Therefore; claim 40 is rejected for at least the same reason as claim 21 above.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record, listed on form PTO-892, and not relied upon, if any, is considered pertinent to applicant’s disclosure.
Chien et al. (US Patent Publication No. 2019/0101402 A1) discloses techniques of identifying, processing and displaying data point clusters associated with map information in an efficient manner. Methods and systems are disclosed which process map information to identify clusters of requested data points for display, based on iterative clustering and filtering of the data points. Methods and systems are also disclosed which generate polygons representing the clusters. The amount of data to be processed and/or displayed can be reduced, without loss of any associated information content in a displayed map.
Aasman et al. (US Patent Publication No. 2008/0243908 A1) discloses a a method for creating a graph database which is arranged to store data in the form of graph tuples comprising n-parts, are described. In an embodiment, each tuple-part is encoded into a unique part identifier (UPI). A geospatial UPI is defined for two-dimensional data elements that include a plurality of data points defined by respective pairs of an X-ordinate and a Y-ordinate. A two-dimensional data space is divided into a plurality of uniform Y strips of defined widths. The Y-strip width is selected to correspond approximately to an anticipated Y dimension of a typical search region of interest. The geospatial UPI encodes a plurality of coordinate points in a two-dimensional data space into a single datum that includes respective pairs of an X-ordinate and a Y-ordinate. The geospatial UPI comprises a data structure arranged in order of sort priority by the geospatial UPI type code, geospatial subtype, and Y-strip identifier followed by the X-ordinate data and Y-ordinate data. The component fields of the data structure are arranged so that the datum can be sorted linearly as a single unsigned integer, thus facilitating a search over a two dimensional region of the data by allowing a search process to linearly scan a limited identifiable region of each of the several strips overlapping the search region of interest.
Bowman et al. (US Patent Publication No. 2012/0166446 A1) discloses indexing and retrieving spatial data with a quadtree index in database management systems are described. In an embodiment, data objects are stored without decomposition within a linearized quadtree stored within a B-tree index. In another embodiment, a method determines an optimal execution plan for a spatial query by parsing it to determine a query type and geometry object associated with the query. The method tessellates the query object by recursively decomposing the quadtree blocks that cover it. Cost-based decomposition decisions are made by consulting a cost model furnished by the database management system to minimize the cost of the resulting index range plan on the B-tree storage. Thus, data-directed query decomposition enacted by the method results in the optimal cost index range plan for the current data distribution and system context. In another embodiment, a system identifies and displays an optimal index range plan in a user interface.
Evans et al. (US Patent Publication No. 2007/0027903 A1) discloses a system and method links one or more disparate community awareness management (CAM) datasets for a community awareness program (CAP) with one or more spatial layers to create linked CAM datasets. One or more data attributes common to a CAM dataset and a spatial layer are identified, and the link is defined between the CAM dataset and the spatial layer. The spatial layer and the linked CAM dataset then may be queried using a single input query. Features from the spatial layer and features from the linked CAM dataset that match the query are generated for display. In one embodiment, a system and method manage CAP assets, transactions, interest areas for the CAP, and buffer areas for the CAP. An audience utility enables entering and maintaining audience data for the CAP. A journal utility enables making journal entries for one or more audience members, CAP assets, transactions, and/or other CAM data. A link document utility enables linking one or more documents to CAM data.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to HASANUL MOBIN whose telephone number is (571)270-1289. The examiner can normally be reached on 9AM to 6:00PM EST M-F.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Charles Rones can be reached at 571-272-4085. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300. Information regarding the status of an application may be obtained from the Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) system. Status information for published applications may be obtained from either Private PAIR or Public PAIR. Status information for unpublished applications is available through Private PAIR only. For more information about the PAIR system, see http://pair-direct.uspto.gov. Should you have questions on access to the Private PAIR system, contact the Electronic Business Center (EBC) at 866-217-9197 (toll-free). If you would like assistance from a USPTO Customer Service Representative or access to the automated information system, call 800-786-9199 (IN USA OR CANADA) or 571-272-1000.
/HASANUL MOBIN/
Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2168
