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v13s
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golden-fto-layer-a

Tasks:
Text Classification
Feature Extraction
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Languages:
English
Size:
10K - 100K
Tags:
patent
prior-art
freedom-to-operate
fto
office-action
uspto
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golden-fto-layer-a / README.md
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Release v1.1.20260513 (Layer A)
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metadata 
language:
  - en
license: cc-by-4.0
size_categories:
  - 1K<n<10K
task_categories:
  - text-classification
  - feature-extraction
tags:
  - patent
  - prior-art
  - freedom-to-operate
  - fto
  - office-action
  - uspto
  - epo
  - multi-jurisdiction
  - intellectual-property
  - legal-nlp
pretty_name: Layer A — Office Action Triples for FTO Eval
configs:
  - config_name: default
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: '**/jurisdiction=*/filing_year=*/*.parquet'
  - config_name: us
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: US/jurisdiction=US/filing_year=*/*.parquet
  - config_name: ep
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: EP/jurisdiction=EP/filing_year=*/*.parquet
  - config_name: prior_art_index
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: prior_art_index/*/index.parquet

Layer A — Office Action Triples for FTO Evaluation

A public dataset of (invention → cited prior art → outcome) triples extracted from the USPTO Office Action Research Dataset (OARD)

  • USPTO Open Data Portal (ODP) API (US slice) and the EPO Open Patent Services (OPS) Register service (EP slice). Built as the agent-evaluation substrate for Parallax, an AI-native Freedom-to- Operate (FTO) and defensive-publication platform for individual inventors and small teams.

Curated by Vox (org: v13s). Parallax is a Vox product; the curation layer (annotations, severity tagging, schema, manifest) is © Vox 2026 under CC-BY-4.0. The underlying USPTO patent data is public domain.

TL;DR

  • 5 011 rows (v1.1.20260513): 5 000 US Office Actions (filing years 2011–2017) + 11 EP search reports (filing years 2014–2018)
  • 14 Parquet shards, partitioned by jurisdiction × filing_year
  • Schema: (case_id, invention, examination, prior_art[], outcome, provenance) — see Schema below
  • Two jurisdictions live (US, EP); JP gated on INPIT bulk credential issuance
  • License: CC-BY-4.0 on the curation; underlying patent documents remain in the public domain
  • SHA-256 manifest at MANIFEST.json for byte-level reproducibility

Quick start 

from datasets import load_dataset

# Default config returns both jurisdictions (5 011 rows).
ds = load_dataset("v13s/golden-fto-layer-a", split="train")
print(len(ds))                           # 5011

# Per-jurisdiction configs are also available.
ds_us = load_dataset("v13s/golden-fto-layer-a", "us", split="train")
ds_ep = load_dataset("v13s/golden-fto-layer-a", "ep", split="train")
print(len(ds_us), len(ds_ep))            # 5000, 11

row = ds[0]
print(row["case_id"])                    # e.g. "US-13004847-0"
print(row["invention"]["title"])         # "SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR ..."
print(row["examination"]["oa_type"])     # "rejection" | "search_report"
print(row["examination"]["rejection_reasons"])  # ["obviousness_103"]
for ref in row["prior_art"]:
    print(ref["ref_id"], ref["severity"])
    # US: "US9123456B2", "obviousness"
    # EP: "US6825941",   "novelty_destroying"

Schema

Each row is a single Office Action event linked to its prior-art citations. The full schema lives at data-pipeline/src/layer_a/schema.py in the source repo.

Field Type Description
case_id string Stable id: <jurisdiction>-<application_number>-<oa_seq>
schema_version string Per-row schema version (1.0 legacy / 1.2 post-2026-05-07)
jurisdiction string US or EP; JP in future versions
source_dataset string uspto_oard (US rows) or epo_ops (EP rows)
extracted_at timestamp[s, UTC] When this row was emitted
invention struct Application metadata — title, abstract, IPC/CPC codes, claims, applicant
examination struct OA event — oa_date, oa_type ∈ {rejection, allowance, search_report}, rejection_reasons[], examiner_id
prior_art list Cited references — ref_id, ref_type, source (examiner/applicant), rejection_basis, claims_blocked[], severity, categories[] (v1.2+), metadata
outcome struct Final disposition — final_disposition, disposition_date, granted_claims[], amendments_made, decision_source (v1.1+)
provenance struct Audit trail — parser_version, source_file, manifest_sha256, validation_status, validation_notes[]

Severity enum (prior_art[].severity)

A 3-value severity enum that downstream consumers can join across jurisdictions. Each jurisdiction has its own source signal:

Severity US (OARD signal) EP (WIPO ST.14 search-report category)
novelty_destroying rejection_102=1 AND citation_in_oa=1 X or E (incl. multi-char XY, XYI)
obviousness rejection_103=1 AND citation_in_oa=1 Y
background otherwise (PTO-892, PTO-1449 IDS) A, P, D, T, L, O, I

The EP search-report category sometimes concatenates multiple codes (e.g. "XY" means the citation is BOTH novelty-relevant AND obviousness-relevant). The lowering preserves the raw string and the extractor maps the most-severe component to severity.

prior_art[].categories (v1.2+)

The single-string severity collapses multi-character ST.14 codes to one band (e.g. XY → novelty_destroying, dropping the inventive-step signal). To preserve the full set, v1.2 adds a categories: list<string> field with each code as its own alphabetically-sorted entry:

Source category severity categories
X novelty_destroying ["X"]
Y obviousness ["Y"]
XY novelty_destroying ["X", "Y"]
XYI novelty_destroying ["I", "X", "Y"]
A background ["A"]

Legacy v1.0 / v1.1 rows have categories = [] (empty). Jurisdictions whose source data doesn't expose ST.14 codes (US OARD uses 35 USC § sections, not ST.14) also leave the field empty. Filter for len(categories) > 0 to query only ST.14- exposed rows.

Cross-citation index (v1.2+)

A sibling partition prior_art_index/<jurisdiction>/index.parquet aggregates the cases partition by (ref_id, citing_jurisdiction) so consumers can ask "how often has document X been cited" without walking the cases data row-by-row.

from datasets import load_dataset

idx = load_dataset(
    "v13s/golden-fto-layer-a", "prior_art_index", split="train",
)
# Top-cited refs in EP search reports
top = sorted(
    [r for r in idx if r["citing_jurisdiction"] == "EP"],
    key=lambda r: r["citation_count"], reverse=True,
)[:10]
for r in top:
    print(r["ref_id"], r["citation_count"], r["citing_case_ids"])

Index schema:

Field Type Description
ref_id string Cited document id (e.g. US10721059)
citing_jurisdiction string Where the citing examiner sits (EP, US)
citation_count int32 Total times this ref appears in prior_art[] across cases
citing_case_ids list Sorted set of case_id values that cite this ref
severity_distribution struct Count by severity band (novelty_destroying, obviousness, background)
first_cited_date date Earliest examination.oa_date across citing cases
last_cited_date date Latest examination.oa_date across citing cases

Per-jurisdiction subdirs (prior_art_index/EP/, prior_art_index/US/) keep the index sharded by which extractor produced it. To get a cross-jurisdiction view, union the partition or use the default config above which includes both.

Rejection reason codes

Canonical 3-letter codes consistent across jurisdictions:

Code USC § Description
anticipation_102 35 USC §102 Lack of novelty (single-reference)
obviousness_103 35 USC §103 Obviousness (multi-reference combination)
subject_matter_101 35 USC §101 Patent-eligible subject matter (Alice/Mayo/Bilski)
indefiniteness_112 35 USC §112 Written description / definiteness
double_patenting non-statutory Same invention claimed twice

Future EP/JP releases add their statute-equivalent codes (novelty_epc_54, inventive_step_epc_56, novelty_jp_29_1, etc.) without breaking the schema.

How was this built?

US slice (5 000 rows)

  1. OARD bulk download (the 4M-row USPTO Office Action Research Dataset, frozen at the 2017 release): manually browser-downloaded from research.uspto.gov, mirrored to v13s/oard-2017-mirror for repeatable fetches
  2. office_actions.csv scan for the first 5 000 unique application IDs in chronological order
  3. citations.csv filter pass to keep only those 5 000 apps' citation rows (~50 MB filtered from a 4 M-row, 5 GB unfiltered source)
  4. USPTO ODP API enrichment per app (60 RPM rate limit; ~85 minutes wall-clock for the full pass)
  5. Triple construction — the OARD's pre-classified rejection_* boolean columns + the citation rows + the ODP metadata combine into a LayerATriple per OA event

EP slice (11 rows, new in v1.0.2)

  1. EP publications list curated from Espacenet IPC searches (G06F, H04L, A61K), filing years 2014–2018
  2. OPS published-data full-cycle for biblio + claims (epodoc/docdb format, kind-suffix fallback for older publications)
  3. OPS Register service (/rest-services/register/publication/ epodoc/{pub}/biblio) for search-report citations — these carry the WIPO ST.14 category codes, mapped to severity via the table above
  4. Two-endpoint merge per publication: full-cycle gives the bibliographic context; the Register service gives the prior_art[] list. Filtered to @cited-phase == "search" to keep the high-signal X/Y/A subset
  5. Triple construction — same LayerATriple shape as the US slice; oa_type = "search_report", outcome.final_disposition = "pending" (EP grants land in a separate legal-status endpoint, planned for v1.1)

Common steps (both slices)

  1. Validation: every row passes a linking validator that checks temporal sanity (cited prior art filed before the invention), severity coherence (novelty-destroying citations on a granted+unamended application would be an inconsistency), and schema round-trip
  2. Parquet emit partitioned by jurisdiction × filing_year, with a SHA-256 manifest for byte-level reproducibility
  3. HuggingFace push under v13s/golden-fto-layer-a

The full pipeline source lives in the public repo at parallax/data-pipeline. The release runner is bin/local-extract-v1.sh.

Known limitations

  • Sample size: 5 011 rows are a first cut. The full OARD has 4 M+ Office Actions; ramp-up to 50 K+ US rows in v1.1+ is planned. The EP slice is intentionally small (11 publications) to validate the OPS Register integration end-to-end before scaling.
  • Sparse claim text: The ODP search endpoint returns bibliographic metadata (title, applicant, IPC) but not full claim text. Some rows have invention.claims = [] or placeholder markers; full claim extraction needs a separate ODP call (planned for v1.1).
  • JP not yet shipped: JP slice gated on INPIT bulk credential approval; see docs/07-partnerships/inpit-bulk-data-application.md.
  • EP claim ranges: The Register service embeds claim ranges in the citation's bibliographic text annotation ([Y] 5,12). v1.0.3+ extracts these into prior_art[].claims_blocked; legacy v1.0.2 rows leave the list empty.
  • Mixed schema_version partition: rows from v1.0 / v1.1 cron cycles carry schema_version="1.0" and an empty categories[], while v1.2+ rows carry schema_version="1.2" and populated categories[] (when the source supports ST.14). Filter on schema_version if you need a single-version partition.
  • EP outcome field is conservative: Without joining the OPS legal-status endpoint, outcome.final_disposition defaults to pending for EP rows. v1.1 will resolve to granted / rejected / withdrawn.
  • US outcome field is conservative: Without joining USPTO PEDS (Patent Examination Data System), the same defaulting applies on the US slice.

Versioning

Semantic versioning per golden-dataset-plan.md:

  • MAJOR — schema-incompatible (field removed, type changed)
  • MINOR — new fields, new jurisdictions, ≥10 % data growth
  • PATCH — parser bugfix, individual case re-validation

The HuggingFace dataset repo's git history is the canonical release ledger. To pin a specific version in your code:

ds = load_dataset("v13s/golden-fto-layer-a", revision="v1.1.20260513")

Citation

If you use this dataset in academic work, please cite:

@dataset{vox_layer_a_2026,
  author       = {Hara, Yoichiro and {Vox}},
  title        = {Layer A — Office Action Triples for
                  Freedom-to-Operate Evaluation},
  year         = 2026,
  publisher    = {Hugging Face},
  version      = {{1.1.20260513}},
  url          = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/v13s/golden-fto-layer-a},
  note         = {Curated under CC-BY-4.0; underlying patent
                  data in the public domain}
}

License

  • Curation layer (this dataset): CC-BY-4.0 — the schema, severity tagging, and triple construction are © Vox 2026 and may be used / redistributed with attribution.
  • Underlying patent documents: public domain (USPTO).
  • OARD source data: public domain (USPTO Office of the Chief Economist).

Contact

For takedown requests on specific patent applications, file an issue or email the curator. Public-domain patent data is included in good faith; the curation layer can be redacted on request.