riferitoa

Riferitoa is a term used in information science to describe a conceptual model for linking data items and their sources across documents, with an emphasis on traceability of citations and references. The model aims to allow readers to navigate from a quoted fragment to its origin and from the origin to related materials. Riferitoa is not an official standard; it appears in theoretical discussions and experimental implementations addressing how sources are represented in knowledge graphs and digital libraries.

Origin and name

The coinage draws on the Italian verb riferire, meaning to report or relay, and has appeared in several Italian-language papers and multilingual discussions about information provenance. It is often presented as an umbrella concept for reference graph design rather than a fixed specification.

Technical overview

A riferitoa-based system models each data item as a node with persistent identifiers (such as DOIs, ARKs, or UUIDs) and represents relationships with directed edges labeled cites, cited-by, references, or derived-from. The approach supports bidirectional traversal, provenance tracking, versioning, and the reassembly of sources. It is designed to work with existing metadata standards (Dublin Core, schema.org) and RDF vocabularies to enable interoperability across repositories.

Applications

In digital libraries, riferitoa-inspired frameworks improve quotation tracking, attribution, and reproducibility. In research workflows, they help maintain provenance of datasets and code. In journalism, they can aid in verifying quotations and sources by providing clear, navigable linkages between content and its origins.

See also

Provenance metadata, citation networks, persistent identifiers, knowledge graphs, digital libraries.