Byfrom

Byfrom is a metadata concept used in digital publishing and information management to encode attribution information that combines both authorship and provenance of content. In this schema, the byfrom field identifies who created the content (the 'by' component) and where the content originated (the 'from' component), enabling more precise provenance tracking than a byline alone.

Etymology and scope: The term derives from a contraction of by and from. It emerged in discussions about content provenance and licensing in the 2010s and has been proposed as a machine-readable extension to traditional metadata for news articles, reports, and user-generated content.

Representation and usage: Byfrom is typically stored as structured metadata, such as an object or pair: byfrom: {author: 'Alice Smith', origin: 'OpenNews Archive'} or as a semicolon-delimited string 'Alice Smith; OpenNews Archive'. It may be used alongside standard fields like byline and source, and can be serialized in JSON-LD or RDF to support automated rights management and content recombination.

Standards and adoption: There is currently no universal standard for byfrom. Some content-management systems implement it as a custom field or map it to provenance vocabularies (for example PROV-O) or to schema.org properties related to author and publisher. Its adoption is uneven, with pilot deployments in media and academic publishing.

Benefits and limitations: Byfrom improves attribution granularity and licensing compliance, aids content aggregators, and supports traceability in republication workflows. Trade-offs include potential ambiguity in semantics when integrating with other provenance schemas and the lack of widely accepted specification.

See also: byline, provenance, metadata, licensing, schema.org, PROV-O.