The Premier
Bibliographic
Data Model
An interoperable, machine-readable data model for citations — created by the authors of ISO 690:2021, trusted by IETF, BIPM, OIML, and 27 standards organizations.
id: ISO 690:2021
title:
- content: Information and documentation
language: en
script: Latn
- content: Guidelines for bibliographic
language: en
script: Latn
type: standard
docid:
id: ISO 690:2021
type: ISO
date:
- type: published
value: '2021'
contributor:
- organization:
name: International Organization
for Standardization
role:
- publisher
edition: "3"Five Layers of Bibliographic Intelligence
Relaton spans from the ISO 690 standard through to formatted citations — a complete pipeline for machine-readable references.
ISO 690
The international standard for bibliographic references and citations — Relaton is its machine-readable implementation.
Information Model
BibliographicItem + 14 entities, 60+ relation types — a comprehensive data model covering all ISO 690 data elements.
Serializations
YAML, XML, BibTeX, AsciiBib, and JSON-LD — the same data in five formats, suited to different workflows.
Auto-Fetch
30 flavor gems retrieve metadata from SDO datasets by publication identifier — no manual citation maintenance.
Rendering
Formatted citations in ISO 690, APA, MLA, and custom styles — beyond what BibTeX or CSL can express.
Supported Standards Organizations
27 organizations and 2 identifier systems across international, regional, national, and industry bodies.
Software Ecosystem
34 Ruby gems covering core libraries, CLI tools, and 30 flavor-specific data retrievers.
Core Libraries
relaton and relaton-bib — the foundation
CLI Tools
relaton-cli and relaton-render — fetch, convert, cite
Flavor Gems
One per standards organization
Latest News
Relaton.org redesigned — a comprehensive guide to bibliographic data modeling
The Relaton documentation site has been completely redesigned with new ISO 690 companion guides, flavor-specific model extension documentation, serialization examples in multiple formats, and restructured information architecture.
Read more →Support for ISBN bibliographic information auto-fetch through the OpenLibrary
Relaton now supports auto-fetching OpenLibrary bibliographic information via ISBN-10 and ISBN-13.
Read more →NIST CyberSecurity White Paper PubID scheme change and mapping
With the adoption of the latest NIST PubID 1.0 scheme, the NIST Library has retroactively applied the scheme to CSWPs. This post provides the mapping.
Read more →Support for IEEE IDAMS bibliographic data through the ieee-idams gem
Relaton now supports parsing IEEE IDAMS Exchange Format bibliographic data through the new ieee-idams Ruby gem.
Read more →Support for DOI bibliographic information auto-fetch through CrossRef
Relaton now supports auto-fetching Crossref bibliographic information via DOI identifiers.
Read more →ISO 690:2021 — the new edition of the international standard for bibliographic references
ISO 690:2021, the fourth edition of the international standard for bibliographic references and citations, was published in 2021. We sat down with the key contributors behind the revision process.
Read more →