assess-prior-art-and-claims

Purpose

Assess novelty, prior art, claim scope, legal-status observations, and provenance without making unsupported legal conclusions.

Input contract

required: [claim_set, target_domain, jurisdiction_scope]
optional: [known_families, search_context, evidence_records]
constraints: [claim text and source provenance required, jurisdiction and observation date must be explicit]

Execution protocol

Do not perform called SOP operations inline; each loaded SOP owns its contract and thresholds.

1. You MUST load skill parse-patent-claim to parse independent and dependent claims and map elements to technical functions.
2. You MUST load skill trace-patent-family to trace priority, family, continuation, and citation relationships.
3. You MUST load skill assess-patent-claim-scope to assess breadth, limiting elements, overlap, and design-around vulnerability.
4. You MUST load skill assess-patent-legal-status to classify observed status by jurisdiction and date.
5. You MUST load skill verify-evidence-independence to check source independence before synthesizing novelty findings. If the retained claims expose absent feature combinations, consider map-patent-white-space as the next tactic.

Deviation: Skip status or independence checks only when the corresponding input is absent; record the omission as an open question. Do not infer legal status from an undated or single-source record.

Output contract

produces: [claim_element_map, prior_art_family_map, scope_assessment, legal_status_observations, novelty_findings]
delta_fields: [findings, evidence_updates, uncertainties, decisions, open_questions]

Thresholds and quality gates

• Every claim element must map to a cited source or be marked unsupported.
• Any acquisition threshold must use a declared eligible family/source universe and relative coverage, not a fixed historical count.
• Status observations require jurisdiction, observation date, source, and uncertainty.

Failure and counterexamples

Do not call a claim novel because no result was found; mark search coverage and unresolved elements. Do not collapse related family members into one record when claim scope or jurisdiction differs.

Provenance map

• resolved: prior-art-search
• resolved: knowledge-acquisition-claim-analysis
• resolved: knowledge-acquisition-claim-decomposition
• resolved: claim-parsing
• resolved: legal-status-assessment

Preserved source criteria ledger

source	source line	kind	source criterion
claim-analysis	4435	numeric/textual	Budget 30 families / 30 claim / 20 web; HARD-GATE.

Context checkpoint / Delta notes

Append claim elements, family links, scope uncertainties, status observations, source-independence judgments, and unresolved search questions.