"Given that you have a published book with a clear description of the subject matter, it is a very strong case."
Does he actually have a description of the subject matter? I haven't read Beautiful Evidence, but Tufte's descriptions of sparklines that I've read don't say anything about auto-generating sparklines in electronic documents based on data in the document, which is what is claimed in the patent. And claims 16-20 specifically cite embedding in a spreadsheet.
"My first sparkline sketches were made some 15 years ago when I reviewed an HP medical interface for monitoring hospital patients (which involved, I recall, a Unix box for every ICU patient, or maybe a Unix box on a cart wheeled around the hospital). The idea was to put sparklines on the margin of a big spreadsheet recording all patient data (event by time), thereby summarizing the time-series history of each event category. My conclusion was that the medical staff would rarely look at the original spreadsheet and would instead just look down the column of sparklines showing the events time-series. And then the original medical event spreadsheet could then be down-screen if a user wanted details."
Does he actually have a description of the subject matter? I haven't read Beautiful Evidence, but Tufte's descriptions of sparklines that I've read don't say anything about auto-generating sparklines in electronic documents based on data in the document, which is what is claimed in the patent. And claims 16-20 specifically cite embedding in a spreadsheet.
[Update] It seems he does, in fact. Tufte himself wrote a comment called "ET brief history of sparklines" on March 21, 2006 on this page: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
"My first sparkline sketches were made some 15 years ago when I reviewed an HP medical interface for monitoring hospital patients (which involved, I recall, a Unix box for every ICU patient, or maybe a Unix box on a cart wheeled around the hospital). The idea was to put sparklines on the margin of a big spreadsheet recording all patient data (event by time), thereby summarizing the time-series history of each event category. My conclusion was that the medical staff would rarely look at the original spreadsheet and would instead just look down the column of sparklines showing the events time-series. And then the original medical event spreadsheet could then be down-screen if a user wanted details."