Bill Gates, Ray Ozzie and a bunch of other heavy-hitters from Microsoft are named as inventors on a newly issued patent for a "personal data mining" system that would analyze information and make recommendations with the goal of aiding a person's decisions and improving quality of life.

The patent was issued this week, based on a September 2006 patent application. I'm not a patent examiner, of course, but as I was reading, I couldn't help but see similarities to what other companies have been doing for a long time. For example, one potential application cited in the patent would have the system make suggestions or recommendations "with respect to books to read, movies or plays to see and/or places to visit" based on "a user's determined interests and correlations of other users' interest."

Those aren't the only potential applications of the Microsoft patent, but at its core, isn't that what Amazon.com has done, and patented, dating back at least a decade?

At any rate, maybe there's more nuance here than I'm perceiving. The newly issued Microsoft patent essentially takes data mining concepts used by businesses and adapts them for personal use.

"Personal data mining mechanisms and methods are employed to identify relevant information that otherwise would likely remain undiscovered," according to the patent abstract. "Users supply personal data that can be analyzed in conjunction with data associated with a plurality of other users to provide useful information that can improve business operations and/or quality of life. Personal data can be mined alone or in conjunction with third party data to identify correlations amongst the data and associated users. Applications or services can interact with such data and present it to users in a myriad of manners, for instance as notifications of opportunities."

Of course, it's not all about improving lives: Further down, the patent explains that "such data can be afforded to businesses involved in market analysis, or the like, in a manner that balances privacy issues of users with demand for high quality information from businesses."

The patent may be more notable for the names of the inventors, which make clear that these concepts were the subject of some pretty high-level discussions at the company a few years ago. In addition to chairman Gates and chief software architect Ozzie, they include Microsoft Live Labs founder Gary Flake; Microsoft advertising R&D chief Alex Gounares; Lili Cheng, now general manager of Microsoft’s Future Social Experiences Labs; Microsoft veteran Amit Mital; and Live Platform Services exec David Treadwell.