Repair-first, gate by gate
Corpus & dedup
647,410 candidate rows reduced to 151,890 canonical records; the 495,520 duplicate burden is reported, not hidden.
Authority & date repair
A source-fidelity ladder (public registers, USPTO ODP, INPADOC, Lens/EPO). US date repair reached 30,458 / 31,242 docs (97.5%) with authoritative ODP dates; non-US projection stays blocked.
Citation pilot
138 examiner-citation edges over a 20-application sample — kept explicitly as a pilot; no citation-topology claim.
When the classifier failed — on purpose
Triage calibration
A gate accepted drift labels for routing but rejected substantive auto-labels at 17% strict / 32% lenient precision.
Why it matters
The failed over-eager classifier is a positive methods finding: automated substantive labelling is not yet trustworthy, so manual cluster review gates any ownership reading.
Open & reproducible
Scripts, EPO families, ODP repair data, and adjudication traces are archived at Zenodo DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20644809.
Patent Topology is an evidence-pipeline / method observatory. It reports corpus scale, a source-fidelity ladder, US date repair, family-ID feasibility, and a pilot citation slice. It makes no claim of ownership, concentration, patent-family topology, citation influence, licensing position, market control, legal status, or freedom-to-operate; those require assignee normalization, non-US date projection, manually reviewed cluster assignments, and family/citation closure. Counts are attributed to this observatory and never fused with other surfaces.