Mark Logic Granted Key Patent

Mark Logic announced this week (see press release) that the company has been granted a fundamental patent related to XML indexing technology. The patent, entitled "Parent-Child Query Indexing for XML Databases," is US patent number 7,171,404 and was granted on 1/30/07.

I think this patent is similar to the patent that my last employer, Business Objects, had on the semantic layer, an abstraction layer that insulated end users from the complexities of relational databases and SQL, and enabled end users to compose their own queries.

So why do I think that these two, technically quite dissimilar, patents have something in common? Because both patented a fundamental invention that enabled a market. Simply put, I think both patents are big deals, dealing with inventions fundamental to software categories.

I should note that this is Mark Logic's second approved patent. (The first was on our unique XML classification system, US patent 7,127,469.)