T 1245/20 (Identifying an application type of unknown data/MAGNET FORENSICS) vom 03.03.2023

Amendment after summons - sole request
Amendment after summons - admissible
Inventive step - sole request
Inventive step - no technical effect over the whole scope of claim

The board is not convinced that there is a credible increase in the speed of the mapping of the retrieved data to a particular application type over the whole scope of the claim since a plurality of associations/catalogues are implicitly needed in the method in claim 1 compared to the single catalogue used in the acknowledged prior art, and the claim does not specify any implementation for which a speed can be determined over the whole scope of the claim.
In the current case, the results of the acknowledged prior art appears to be quite different from that of the invention. The method of claim 1 attempts to identify applications for a database, whereas the prior art attempts to identify data formats for all kinds of applications, i.e. not limited to applications using databases comprising tables. Therefore a speed comparison with the speed of the mapping achieved by the prior art is not meaningful.
One question that arises is whether the method of claim 1 has the potential to cause technical effects. But the mapping and display of the data record in a respective column of the user interface resulting from the claimed method is not specifically adapted for any technical use (see G 1/19, point 94). Since the board does not see any technical effect from the implementation of the claimed method in a computer system derivable over the whole scope of the claim, the claimed subject-matter does not achieve a technical effect over the prior art acknowledged in the application.