Patent 7069560

Prior art

Earlier patents, publications, and products that may anticipate or render the claims unpatentable.

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Prior art

Earlier patents, publications, and products that may anticipate or render the claims unpatentable.

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To identify the most relevant prior art for US Patent 7,069,560, I will focus on the patent citations listed within the document itself, as these are the references explicitly deemed relevant by the patent examiner during prosecution. Prior art refers to any evidence that an invention was already known before the effective filing date of the patent application. This can include patents, printed publications, public use, or other public disclosures.

US Patent 7,069,560 is a continuation application of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/225,198, filed Jan. 5, 1999, which became U.S. Pat. No. 6,851,115. This parent application itself would contain relevant prior art.

I will now list the prior art explicitly cited in US7069560B1 as found on Google Patents, providing full citation, publication/filing date, brief description, and which claim(s) it potentially anticipates under 35 U.S.C. § 102.

Cited U.S. Patent Documents:

  • U.S. Pat. No. 6,021,427 A

    • Inventors: Spagna et al.
    • Publication Date: February 2000
    • Filing Date: (Not explicitly stated in US7069560's front page, but prior to Feb 2000)
    • Brief Description: (Description not available from the provided text, but as a cited patent, it likely relates to distributed systems or agent-based technologies).
    • Potentially Anticipating Claims: All claims that cover aspects disclosed in the Spagna et al. patent. To determine specific anticipation under 35 U.S.C. § 102, a detailed comparison of the claims of US7069560 with the full text of US6021427 would be required. Anticipation means that a single prior art reference discloses every element of a claimed invention.

  • U.S. Pat. No. 6,026,388 A

    • Inventors: Liddy et al.
    • Publication Date: February 2000
    • Filing Date: (Not explicitly stated in US7069560's front page, but prior to Feb 2000)
    • Brief Description: (Description not available from the provided text, but likely related to information retrieval, natural language processing, or expert systems given the common classifications for 7069560).
    • Potentially Anticipating Claims: Claims relating to natural language processing, information retrieval, or goal interpretation, if these aspects are fully disclosed in the Liddy et al. patent.

  • U.S. Pat. No. 6,080,202 A

    • Inventors: Strickland et al.
    • Publication Date: June 2000
    • Filing Date: (Not explicitly stated in US7069560's front page, but prior to June 2000)
    • Brief Description: (Description not available from the provided text, but as a cited patent, it likely describes a system relevant to distributed computing or agent coordination).
    • Potentially Anticipating Claims: Claims pertaining to methods or systems for coordinating distributed processes or agents.

  • U.S. Pat. No. 6,144,989 A

    • Inventors: Hodjat et al.
    • Publication Date: November 2000
    • Filing Date: (Not explicitly stated in US7069560's front page, but prior to Nov 2000)
    • Brief Description: (Description not available from the provided text, but would likely be a system or method related to distributed software or data processing).
    • Potentially Anticipating Claims: Any claim elements found to be fully described in the Hodjat et al. patent.

  • U.S. Pat. No. 6,173,279 B1

    • Inventors: Levin et al.
    • Publication Date: January 2001
    • Filing Date: (Not explicitly stated in US7069560's front page, but prior to Jan 2001)
    • Brief Description: (Description not available from the provided text, but would likely be relevant to distributed systems or agent-based architectures).
    • Potentially Anticipating Claims: Claims related to the communication protocols or architectural aspects of distributed agents.

  • U.S. Pat. No. 6,192,338 B1

    • Inventors: HaSzto et al.
    • Publication Date: February 2001
    • Filing Date: (Not explicitly stated in US7069560's front page, but prior to Feb 2001)
    • Brief Description: (Description not available from the provided text, but relevant to distributed computing).
    • Potentially Anticipating Claims: Claims covering methods for inter-component communication in distributed environments.

  • U.S. Pat. No. 6,226,666 B1

    • Inventors: Chang et al.
    • Publication Date: May 2001
    • Filing Date: (Not explicitly stated in US7069560's front page, but prior to May 2001)
    • Brief Description: (Description not available from the provided text, but relevant to distributed systems).
    • Potentially Anticipating Claims: Claims related to data management or processing in a distributed system.

  • U.S. Pat. No. 6,338,081 B1

    • Inventors: Furusawa et al.
    • Publication Date: January 2002
    • Filing Date: (Not explicitly stated in US7069560's front page, but prior to Jan 2002)
    • Brief Description: (Description not available from the provided text, but relevant to distributed systems).
    • Potentially Anticipating Claims: Claims that describe architectural elements for distributed computing.

Other Prior Art References (Non-Patent Literature):

The patent also lists several non-patent literature references which would be considered prior art, particularly because some pre-date the priority date of January 5, 1999.

  • "The open agent architecture: ..." by Martin et al. (1999)

    • Authors: Martin, David L.; Cheyer, Adam; SRI International, Lee, Gowang-Lo, Etri
    • Publication Date: 1999 (as cited on Google Patents)
    • Brief Description: This refers to the Open Agent Architecture (OAA), which is the underlying technology for the patent. The patent explicitly states that an initial version of OAA had limitations regarding complex goals and scalability that the present invention addresses. This publication would therefore likely describe the earlier, more limited OAA system.
    • Potentially Anticipating Claims: This reference would likely anticipate aspects of the distributed agent system, facilitator, and client agent interactions, particularly the general concepts of agents registering capabilities and facilitators delegating tasks. However, the patent claims aim to specifically address the limitations of this prior OAA work, particularly regarding complex goal expressions, combinations of boolean connectors, nested expressions, conditional goals, and scalability. Claims 1, 15, 16, and 22, which highlight "arbitrarily complex goal expressions" and "highly scalable" architecture, are designed to differentiate from this prior art.

  • "Development Tools for the Open Agent Architecture" by Cheyer et al. (PAAM 96, April 1996)

    • Authors: Cheyer, Adam, Martin, David and Moran, Douglas, SRI International, AI Center.
    • Publication Date: April 1996
    • Brief Description: This paper describes development tools for the Open Agent Architecture, which includes an agent library providing infrastructure for constructing agent-based systems. It would detail how agents declare solvables (capabilities) and interact with a facilitator.
    • Potentially Anticipating Claims: Similar to the Martin et al. (1999) paper, this reference would anticipate fundamental aspects of agent registration, interagent communication (ICL), and the role of a facilitator. However, the improvements in handling complex goal expressions, advice parameters, and scalability described in US7069560 would likely be distinguished. The procedures for declaring and managing solvables (oaa_Declare, oaa_Undeclare, oaa_Redeclare), updating data solvables (oaa_AddData, oaa_RemoveData, oaa_ReplaceData), and maintaining triggers (oaa_AddTrigger, oaa_RemoveTrigger, oaa_ReplaceTrigger) are mentioned in the patent as provided by the agent library, suggesting these functionalities were part of the OAA software. If these procedures are fully described in this 1996 paper, they could anticipate elements of claims related to agent capabilities and interaction mechanisms.

  • "Information Brokering in an Agent Architecture" by Martin, Oohama, Moran, Cheyer. (PAAM 97, April 1997)

    • Authors: Martin, David; Oohama, Hiroki; Moran, Douglas; Cheyer, Adam
    • Publication Date: April 1997
    • Brief Description: This work likely describes the role of a facilitator in brokering information and services among agents within an agent architecture.
    • Potentially Anticipating Claims: This reference would likely anticipate aspects of the facilitator's role in coordinating agent communications and problem-solving, as described in Claim 1, 15, 16, and 22. The core concept of a facilitator matching requests with agent capabilities would likely be present. The novelty of US7069560 would lie in the flexibility of complex goal expressions and the strategic reasoning employed by the facilitator, which were noted as limitations in earlier OAA work.

  • "The BDIM Agent Toolkit Design" by Busetta, Paolo et al.

    • Authors: Busetta, Paolo et al.
    • Publication Date: (Not explicitly stated in the provided text, but listed as prior art)
    • Brief Description: This reference would describe an agent toolkit design, likely involving methodologies for building agent systems.
    • Potentially Anticipating Claims: General aspects of agent system design and toolkit functionalities.

  • "An Experiment in Integrating Concurrent Engineering Systems" by Tenenbaum, Jay M., Weber, Jay C.

    • Authors: Tenenbaum, Jay M., Weber, Jay C. Enterprise Integration Technologies
    • Publication Date: (Not explicitly stated in the provided text, but listed as prior art)
    • Brief Description: This work likely pertains to the integration of concurrent engineering systems, which may involve distributed components and cooperative problem-solving.
    • Potentially Anticipating Claims: Aspects related to the integration of distributed systems and cooperative task completion.

  • "CommandTalk" (SRI International, Feb. 5, 1999)

    • Publication Date: February 5, 1999
    • Brief Description: Likely a system or publication detailing a command and control interface, possibly utilizing natural language processing within an agent framework.
    • Potentially Anticipating Claims: Claims relating to user interfaces, natural language processing agents, and multimodal input within a distributed agent system. Given its date (Feb 5, 1999), it is very close to the priority date of US7069560 (Jan 5, 1999), meaning it would only be prior art under certain conditions (e.g., if it was publicly available before Jan 5, 1999, or if it relates to an earlier filed application that matured into a patent).

Considerations for Anticipation (35 U.S.C. § 102):

For a prior art reference to anticipate a claim under 35 U.S.C. § 102, it must disclose every single limitation of the claim, either explicitly or inherently. The prior art must also be "enabled," meaning it teaches a person of ordinary skill in the art how to make and use the invention without undue experimentation. However, for prior art to anticipate, it "need not enable the [challenged] claim in its entirety, but instead the reference need only enable a single embodiment of the claim."

The patent itself acknowledges the limitations of prior agent-based technologies, including the initial version of SRI International's Open Agent Architecture (OAA), in handling complex goals and scalability. Therefore, while the core concepts of agent systems, facilitators, and interagent communication may be present in the listed prior art, the specific inventive steps of US7069560 relate to the "arbitrarily complex goal expressions," the facilitator's "strategic reasoning for generating a goal satisfaction plan," and the "highly scalable" architecture, which differentiate it from the cited prior art.

Generated 5/29/2026, 6:47:28 PM