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 in AT&T and found that no technical contribution was provided. Th application was refused.

Full decision O/379/21 69Kb