sourcesto

Sourcesto is a term used in information science to describe a model and, in some contexts, a software approach for recording the provenance of digital content by directly linking outputs to their sources. The central idea is to map each produced item to one or more source items in a structured provenance graph, enabling traceability, reproducibility, and accountability across the production pipeline.

Etymology: The name is a portmanteau of source and to, signaling a directional relationship from inputs to results. In practice, sourcesto is discussed as both a theoretical concept and a practical framework.

Core features include explicit source-to-output links, version-aware records, support for complex workflows, compatibility with established provenance concepts such as graphs and provenance schemas, and the ability to query paths from sources to derived artifacts.

Applications: digital libraries, data science workflows, software build systems, multimedia editing, and scientific research where reproducibility and auditability are important.

Variants: In some settings, sourcesto refers to a software toolkit or platform that implements source-to-output provenance; in others, it remains a conceptual model used to compare provenance approaches. Adoption varies by domain and by the availability of interoperability standards.

Limitations and challenges: Handling large-scale provenance graphs, privacy and security concerns, performance overhead, and the need for standardization to enable cross-system interoperability.

See also: data provenance, provenance graph, source control, citation networks, reproducible research.