Patent decision

BL number

O/123/08

Concerning rights in

GB 0608392.7

Hearing Officer

Mrs S E Chalmers

Decision date

30 April 2008

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Schlumberger Holdings Limited

Provisions discussed

PA 1977 Section 1(2)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The application concerns a method of loading data representing record(s) of measurements from an oil well from a spreadsheet into a database. This is done by using a control file to parse the spreadsheet data according to certain rules before sending the parsed data to the database. As the application explains, it is common in the oil and gas industry to use a loading program to read and decode a dataset and to load the decoded data into tables stored in a database. In the case of industry standard formats, “custom” loaders are written to read a dataset in a specific format and load the decoded data into a specific database. However, in the case of datasets in non-standard files which may contain data records in any format, it is said to be almost impossible to create custom loaders for all such text data layouts. The invention is said to overcome this problem by providing a control file which, by applying certain rules to each record, enables such data to be loaded into the desired database. The hearing officer applied the Aerotel test, found the invention to be excluded as a computer program and refused the application.