Patent decision

BL number

O/409/10

Concerning rights in

GB 0421284.1

Hearing Officer

Miss J Pullen

Decision date

29 November 2010

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Advanced Forensic Solutions Limited

Provisions discussed

PA 1977 Section 1(2)(c)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The application relates to an information analysis arrangement utilised in order to identify unexpected links, risk and uncertainty in and between data in a data set. The application acknowledges the problems of time, scale and utility which are said to prevail in the analysis of even small data sets. The proposed invention uses a static model of the key relationships between the major information sets within a problem domain and the cardinality of these relationships; these are compared to threshold levels of legitimacy to generate an alert or warning. These alerts or warnings are starting points for knowledge discovery involving more detailed analysis of the identified individual cases. The proposed arrangement and methodology can be utilised to provide an information analysis arrangement with respect to a wide range of situations such as insurance fraud or identity theft.

In coming to her decision the Hearing Officer considered the decision in Symbian and

analysed the claims using the Areotel/Macrossan four step test. The Hearing Officer found that the invention related to a computer program and that it did not make a ‘technical contribution’ required to prevent exclusion under Section 1(2) of the Act.