Information models

Citation Model

Citation model for Relaton

Citation Model

A citation in Relaton consists of the following components:

  • An identifier bibitemid for the cited source. This identifier corresponds to the identifier (id) of a Relaton record describing the cited source.

  • An optional date, in ISO 8601 format. This date is not intended for disambiguation, since bibitemid already identifies the source unambiguously; it is added for ease of processing, in case author-date citations cannot straightforwardly extract the date from the bibliographic source.

  • A specification of the locality or localities in the source being cited.

A locality is a hierarchical specification of a location in a source. It is specified as a sequence of named components of the source, each hierarchically refining its predecessor, from greater to smaller:

  • type is the component of the source being specified; in the Relaton grammar, there is a sequence of predefined types, and a user-specified type can be added with the prefix locality:. The predefined types are:

    • whole (i.e. entire document)

    • section

    • clause

    • part

    • paragraph

    • chapter

    • page

    • table

    • annex

    • figure

    • note

    • list

    • example

    • volume

    • issue

    • time

    • anchor (for HTML pages)

  • referenceFrom specifies the instance of the source component being cited; or, if a range of components is being cited, the beginning of the range.

  • referenceTo specified the end of the range, if a range of components is being cited. A range is only expected as the last (most granular) element in a hierarchical sequence of components.

So for example, the hierarchical specification "Part IV, Chapter 3, Paragraphs 22-24" is cited as:

<locality type="part"><referenceFrom>IV</referenceFrom></locality>
<locality type="chapter"><referenceFrom>3</referenceFrom></locality>
<locality type="paragraph">
  <referenceFrom>22</referenceFrom>
  <referenceTo>22</referenceTo>
</locality>
Note
 if the type of the component is whole, no referenceFrom or referenceTo is given.

Discontinuous citations

If two localities occurs in sequence, and have the same type, then they are interpreted as being a discontinuous reference. So “pp. 32, 57, 99” can be specified as:

<locality type="page"><referenceFrom>32</referenceFrom></locality>
<locality type="page"><referenceFrom>57</referenceFrom></locality>
<locality type="page"><referenceFrom>99</referenceFrom></locality>

Alternatively, a sequence of discontinuous references can be specified through the localityStack element. Each localityStack consists of a hierarchical sequence of locality elements, as above; a sequence of locality elements can thus be treated as a single localityStack, with the localityStack wrapper left out.

So for example, the hierarchical specification “Part IV, Chapter 3, Paragraphs 22-24; Part VII, Chapter 2, Paragraph 130” is cited as:

<localityStack>
  <locality type="part"><referenceFrom>IV</referenceFrom></locality>
  <locality type="chapter"><referenceFrom>3</referenceFrom></locality>
  <locality type="paragraph">
    <referenceFrom>22</referenceFrom>
    <referenceTo>22</referenceTo>
  </locality>
</localityStack>
<localityStack>
  <locality type="part"><referenceFrom>VII</referenceFrom></locality>
  <locality type="chapter"><referenceFrom>2</referenceFrom></locality>
  <locality type="chapter"><referenceFrom>130</referenceFrom></locality>
</localityStack>