Patent decision

BL number

O/379/21

Concerning rights in

GB1722308.2

Hearing Officer

Mr H Jones

Decision date

21 May 2021

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Innoplexus AG

Provisions discussed

Section 1(2)(c)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The invention relates to providing a user of computer-based search engines with search suggestions based upon words or phrases entered by the user as a query. The invention makes use of ontologies, that is a collection of keywords, phrases and concepts associated with related subject matter. Words and phrases of the user-™s query are classified according to whether they relate to concepts present in the ontology or not. The final word or phrase in the user-™s entered query is not used in isolation to determine a suggestion, but is rather concatenated with the preceding word or phrase of the query which has been classified as a concept present in the ontology. The applicant alleged that this results in a more accurate suggestion for the user. The hearing officer assessed the contribution against the five signposts to patentability set out inAT&Tand found that no technical contribution was provided. Th application was refused.

Full decisionO/379/21  69Kb