Sourcesas

Sourcesas is a term found in discussions of provenance, citation management, and content workflows. It is not a widely standardized concept and does not refer to a single official specification. In practice, sourcesas is used to describe mechanisms that treat source material as first-class objects embedded in or linked to other items, rather than as merely quoted text.

Origins of the term are informal; it is often described as a contraction of "sources as" to emphasize a policy or schema in which sources themselves carry structured metadata and governance rules.

Domains and usage: In content management systems and scholarly publishing, a sourcesas directive or field can attach source metadata to a document, including title, author, date, and citation format, while preserving the link to the original item. In data workflows and knowledge graphs, sourcesas may indicate the provenance of a data point, linking to a source record and enabling traceability of transformations.

Structure and representation: Implementations vary; a sourcesas object might be a simple key-value map or a nested structure with fields such as id, title, author, publication date, publisher, URL, license, and a preferred citation. Representations can appear in JSON, YAML, XML, or internal data models, depending on the platform.

Relation to standards: There is no universal standard for sourcesas, and its meaning is context dependent. It intersects with established concepts such as data provenance, citation metadata, bibliographic schemas, and repository governance, but its adoption and interpretation differ across systems.

See also: data provenance, citation metadata, bibliographic schemas, provenance tracking, knowledge graphs.