c) Database management systems and information retrieval systems 

In T 107/87 the board held that a data coding rule for identifying and eliminating statistical redundancy contributed to the solution of a technical problem where it was used to reduce the amount of data to be stored or transmitted. This meant that if a computer-implemented method included steps of losslessly compressing and decompressing intermediate results to reduce the amount of memory space required for storing those results, at least those steps would make a technical contribution. The implementation of the coding rule would normally still be algorithmic in nature (see also T 650/13).

In T 1242/04 (OJ 2007, 421) the invention related to a system for providing product-specific data in a service station. Since the claims featured a central database for recording the required status and an archive store for recording the actual status which communicated with each other by computing means, the board found that they had technical character.

In T 279/05 the invention related to determining airline seat availability. The invention involved a mixture of technical aspects, e.g. servers, and non-technical aspects, e.g. airline seat availability and yield management. Database querying was considered be a technical field by the board.

In T 1924/17 the board saw no reason why relational database management systems should be non-technical, if it was accepted that database management systems in general were technical. The board noted that its position was not that all features implemented in (relational) database management systems contributed by virtue of this fact alone and independent of their nature to the technical character of an invention. The board reviewed decisions relating to accessing data base management systems (T 1242/04 (OJ EPO 2007, 421), T 279/05, T 862/05, T 658/06, T 1500/08, T 963/09, T 104/12, T 1965/11) and information retrieval (T 1569/05, T 1316/09, T 309/10, T 2230/10, T 598/14). In the light of these decisions, the board in T 1924/17 summarised that structured declarative queries, which are used for retrieving data managed in a relational database management system, normally have precise, formally defined semantics and the database management system then retrieves the specified data set as a result. It explained that relational database management systems typically executed such queries by determining an efficient query execution plan based on cost estimates for the necessary internal operations of the computer system. Such database management systems were software platforms for the centralised control of data. Features of these platforms often had a technical character, as they had been designed based on engineering considerations concerning the efficient exploitation of the computer system as a technical system. Information retrieval systems typically had to formally calculate a semantic similarity of documents, which is typically regarded as involving non-technical considerations and being based on subjective criteria and the content (semantics) of the documents to be retrieved.