Patent decision

BL number

O/692/21

Concerning rights in

GB 1313192.5

Hearing Officer

Mrs C L Davies

Decision date

22 September 2021

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Luke Leonard Martin Porter

Provisions discussed

PA 1977 Section 1(2)(c)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The invention relates to bi-temporal relational databases i.e. databases including a valid time and transaction time. In such databases, the data content can change over time, errors can occur in data entry, and queries may relate to “old” database content. This can give rise to temporal overlaps and gaps in the data. Therefore, the problem the invention addresses is how to provide an improved bi-temporal relational database that ensures there are no temporal gaps or overlaps in data. The invention supports data integrity and temporal queries in a transaction database under evolving data entries/content by storing the temporal data separately in three underlying tables and automatically updating time data/generating end-dates to avoid temporal overlaps. As a result, the possibility of gaps/overlaps in valid time is eliminated, and the user does not have to manually enter/update end times of transactions because they are automatically updated from the start times of subsequent events entered by the user.

On applying the Aerotel/Macrossan test, the Hearing Officer found that the claimed invention was excluded as a computer program as such. The application was refused under section 18(3).

Full decision O/692/21 423Kb