Re: Patent pending: Network-based classified information systems

At 11:58 PM 2/19/98 -0500, Renato Iannella wrote:

>The proposal fails to include a description of RDF.
>RDF will (and has) provided all the markup features
>described in the proposal - royalty free.

Absolutely true!  And I speak with my
member-of-the-RDF-Schema-Working-Group hat on.

Furthermore, we (Verity) began demonstrating integrated full-text search
with category navigation more than a year ago and are days away from
releasing the preview version of this capability as an add-on to our
Information Server.

The only impact I can see for this patent is to cause our customers and
others to avoid implementing these capabilities as specified by the patent.
 Since the patent would have to be defined quite narrowly to escape prior
art, that should be easy.

In this community, unless one works at Microsoft, one is wiser to announce
terrific new implementations rather than terrific new patents.  Microsoft
is able to use such announcements as neurotoxins, designed to paralyze the
competition.  None of the rest of us enjoy quite that position, so our
patents are mostly useful only for waving in the face of anyone who is
naive enough to wave their patents in our faces...

Nick
--
    Senior Product Manager, Knowledge Applications
        Verity Inc.  (http://www.verity.com/)
        "Connecting People with Information"
  Phone: (408) 542-2164  E-mail: narnett@verity.com

Received on Monday, 23 February 1998 15:18:04 UTC