referenceacross

Referenceacross is a framework and set of practices for managing cross-document references across heterogeneous data sources. It aims to connect references from multiple documents—such as articles, books, patents, and legal filings—into a coherent, navigable graph that supports discovery, disambiguation, and provenance tracking. The core idea is to treat references not as isolated strings but as interoperable entities that can be resolved to canonical works and linked across editions, translations, and related works.

A typical referenceacross architecture includes an ingestion layer that normalizes metadata from diverse sources, an identifier resolution layer that maps disparate identifiers (DOIs, ISBNs, URLs, URNs) to canonical entities, and a cross-reference graph that encodes relationships such as cites, references, isVersionOf, and isTranslatedFrom. The data model commonly comprises entities such as Document, Work, Person, Organization, Identifier, and Relation, with relations expressed as directed edges in a graph database.

Applications include digital libraries, scholarly publishing platforms, legal research systems, and standards registries, where users benefit from improved search, accurate citation linking, edition and translation alignment, and traceable provenance. Standards and interoperability are supported through OpenCitations conventions, schema.org/CreativeWork, OpenURL, BibTeX, JSON-LD, and RDF-backed representations.

Challenges include handling schema heterogeneity, reference drift, performance, privacy concerns, and licensing constraints, requiring governance, curation, and sustainable identifier resolution strategies. The concept draws on bibliographic data integration and knowledge-graph approaches and is not tied to a single product but rather to a family of methodologies for cross-document connectivity.