Patent decision

BL number

O/143/12

Concerning rights in

GB1019835.6

Hearing Officer

Miss J Pullen

Decision date

30 March 2012

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Lexis Nexis Risk Solutions FL Inc

Provisions discussed

PA 1977 Section 1(2)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The invention relates to systems and methods for improved database queries where records may be incomplete and/or confidential and/or duplicated, to combine records in a way such that when a search query is executed multiple possible matches are returned. Each match is assigned a confidence score, and a test of the ratio between a highly ranked result and the next result, or sum of the other results in formed, and if the confidence score exceeds a threshold the result is output. The output identifies the records in a ‘foreign’ database which should be retrieved.

The Hearing Officer considered the four-step test in Aerotel/Macrossan in the light of the Symbian judgment, and found the contribution to relate to methods and systems for making database queries with returned values having a high confidence level. The Hearing Officer found the contribution to relate to a computer program as such and could find no technical contribution and so refused the applications under Section 18(3).

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