From Distinguishability to Identifiability: An Operational Framework for Quantum States, Geometry, and Processes.

When does operational distinguishability contain sufficient information to identify physical structure? We address this question through a resource-relative framework of Operational Informational Distinguishability (OID), designed to investigate the mathematical consistency of identifiability across quantum states, information geometry, and physical processes. An operational observer is characterized by (D=(A,M,R,δ)), whose labelled outcome distributions define an operational signature and induce equivalence classes of physically indistinguishable realizations. We establish an exact reconstruction criterion: a proposed geometric assignment factors uniquely through the operational signature if and only if it is constant on these equivalence classes. This provides a necessary-and-sufficient condition for operational reconstruction, while separating identifiability from the additional requirements of local non-degeneracy and stability. For faithful finite-dimensional quantum-state manifolds, we establish the measurement–information-geometric hierarchy[g(M) gSLD gBKMrelating measurement-restricted Fisher information, the symmetric logarithmic derivative metric, and the Bogoliubov–Kubo–Mori metric. We clarify the directional attainability of the SLD bound and its distinction from simultaneous multiparameter attainability. As an explicit algebraic result, we characterize the operator span generated by diagonal phase modulation of cyclic-shift eigenstate projectors in the one-excitation sector: it is precisely the constant-diagonal Hermitian subspace, of dimension (N²-N+1), leaving (N-1) independent population directions unresolved. Adjoining site-basis projectors restores informational completeness. This idealized construction is connected to experimentally realized entangled measurements of (W) states. We further extend operational distinguishability to quantum processes through tester-restricted signatures and divergences, explicitly separating signalling from intervention-defined causal influence. Finally, we introduce accumulated information-geometric path length as a candidate operational clock parameter, without identifying it with physical time. By relating these constructions to holographic information-distance bounds, bulk entanglement, conditional mutual information and recovery, and recent approaches to emergent geometry and informational time, we formulate a central testable question: can a common resource-relative distinguishability structure remain identifiable, stable, and compositionally consistent across states, processes, geometry, temporal ordering, and causality? The framework makes both constructive reconstruction and mathematically explicit obstructions possible, providing a falsifiable methodological program rather than presupposing the emergence or unification of physical structure.