About Relaton

The machine-readable information model for bibliographic references, built on ISO 690

The Name

Relaton is a compound of two ancient roots:

• The Latin relat- — the stem of referre, meaning "to carry back, to bring back, to relate." This is the same root that gives us reference, relation, and relate. Every bibliographic citation is an act of relatio — carrying a reader back to the original source.
• The Greek-flavored scientific suffix -on — used across the sciences to denote a fundamental, indivisible unit or entity. The electr-on is the elementary particle of charge; the phot-on is the quantum of light. A Relat-on is thus the elementary unit of bibliographic relation — the atomic particle of scholarly connectivity.

Together, the name captures the essence of the project: that bibliographic data is not a flat list of metadata fields, but a web of relationships between works. Standards cite other standards; documents amend, replace, derive from, and supersede one another. Each such link is a Relaton — and Relaton the project models them all with precision and completeness.

The Logo

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The Relaton logo depicts a network of four interconnected nodes, each radiating connections to the others through branching paths. This is not arbitrary decoration — it is a direct visual representation of what Relaton models:

• The circles and squares draw on an ancient East Asian principle: heaven is round, the earth is square (天圓地方). The circle represents the boundless, the abstract, the ideal form of knowledge — the Platonic category that a standard aspires to. The square represents the concrete, the structured, the grounded instance — a specific document, a particular edition, a tangible artifact. In Relaton, these two shapes coexist because every bibliographic record lives in both worlds: the universal concept of a work and the particular manifestation you hold in your hands. The circles and squares flow into one another because a work can be born from the relationship between other works, just as the ancients understood that heaven and earth give rise to all things through their interplay.
• The nodes represent bibliographic entities — standards, papers, datasets, any citable work. Four are shown, but the network extends infinitely in every direction, just as the body of scholarly and technical literature grows without bound.
• The connecting paths represent the 60+ typed relations that Relaton defines between documents: replaces, amends, derives from, has part, obsoletes, updates, and many more. The paths branch and overlap because real-world bibliographic relationships are not one-to-one — a single standard may simultaneously reference, replace, and subsume multiple other works.
• The symmetry of the pattern reflects the model's design principle: every relation has a defined inverse, every connection is bidirectional, and the model treats all bibliographic entities with equal rigor regardless of their source organization.

The Color

The logo's blue (#1F6CF1) is a deliberate choice. Blue is the color of trust, authority, and permanence — the same qualities that define the international standards Relaton serves. It is the color of the ISO wordmark, of academic institutions, and of the hyperlinks that connect the web of knowledge. In the context of bibliographic data, blue signifies reliability: when a machine reads a Relaton record, it can trust that every relation, every identifier, every metadata element has been structured with the precision that standards demand.

What Relaton Does

Relaton is a unified, interoperable, machine-readable information model for bibliographic references and citations. It is the concrete implementation of ISO 690:2021 — the international standard for bibliographic references and citations to information resources — translated into a structured data model that machines can process, validate, and exchange.

ISO 690 itself notes that it "does not specify a data model for machine‑readable citations." Relaton fills that gap — designed by the same team that authored ISO 690:2021, the standard's current edition. Relaton is not merely compliant with ISO 690; it is its definitive machine-readable expression, built by the standard's creators.

The Layered Architecture

Relaton spans five distinct layers:

Layer	Description
ISO 690	The international standard defining the conceptual framework for bibliographic references
Information Model	Relaton's BibliographicItem with 14 entities, 60+ relation types, and 28+ organization flavors
Serializations	YAML, XML, BibTeX, AsciiBib, and JSON-LD interchange formats
Auto-Fetch	Flavor gems that retrieve metadata from 29 SDO datasets by publication identifier alone
Rendering	Formatted citations in ISO 690, APA, MLA, and custom styles via relaton-render

Explore the model →

The Problem We Solve

Before Relaton, each standards organization had its own bibliographic data format, identifier scheme, and citation conventions. This made it impossible to:

• Cross-reference documents from different organizations
• Build tools that work across the standards ecosystem
• Maintain consistent citation quality in standards authoring
• Create machine-readable bibliographic databases

Relaton solves this by providing one unified model that maps to all major standards organizations — and by automating the fetching of bibliographic data so that users need only provide a publication identifier.

Beyond BibTeX

Relaton is significantly more expressive than traditional solutions like BibTeX. Where BibTeX offers a flat key-value structure with ~40 fields, Relaton's model implements the full depth of ISO 690:

• Hierarchical localities — volume, issue, page ranges, and discontinuous extents (e.g. "pp. 1, 5")
• Typed relations — 60+ semantic relations between documents (replaces, amends, derives, hasPart, etc.)
• Multi-script titles — titles in multiple languages and writing systems
• Contributor roles — author, editor, publisher, affiliations, and organizational hierarchy
• Document lifecycle — publication stages, supplements, amendment tracking

Auto-Fetch by Publication Identifier

Relaton's flavor architecture enables automatic retrieval of bibliographic metadata. Given only a publication identifier (e.g. ISO 19115-1:2014 or RFC 8446), Relaton:

1. Routes the identifier to the correct SDO-specific processor (flavor gem)
2. Queries the organization's dataset
3. Returns a fully structured BibliographicItem

This eliminates the need to manually maintain bibliographic citations. The system maintains indexed datasets covering all 28 supported flavors.

View supported organizations →

Who Uses Relaton

Key adopters of Relaton:

• IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) — bibliographic data for RFCs and Internet-Drafts
• BIPM (International Bureau of Weights and Measures) — SI Brochure and Metrologia references
• OIML (International Organization of Legal Metrology) — via Relaton-BIPM
• Metanorma — the standards authoring platform uses Relaton for all bibliographic processing
• Ribose — open source platform for standards development

The Ecosystem

Component	Purpose	Link
relaton-bib	Core BibliographicItem model	Software
relaton	Cache management and gateway	Software
relaton-cli	Command-line interface	Software
relaton-render	Reference formatting (ISO 690 styles)	Software
29 flavor gems	SDO-specific data retrieval	Software
relaton-models	UML model definitions and schemas	GitHub

Open Source

Relaton is fully open source (MIT license), developed by Ribose. Contributions are welcome.

The code lives across multiple repositories in the Relaton GitHub organization.

History

• 2018 — Initial release as part of the Metanorma ecosystem
• 2019 — Separated into standalone gem architecture with relaton, relaton-bib, and per-SDO flavor gems
• 2020–2021 — Expanded flavor gems: ISO, IEC, IETF, IEEE, ITU, NIST, BIPM, 3GPP, OGC, and more
• 2022 — DOI auto-fetch via Crossref; relaton-models formalized with UML and RelaxNG schemas
• 2023 — NIST support updated for new PubID scheme; IETF integration for RFC bibliographic data
• 2024 — ISBN auto-fetch via OpenLibrary; BIPM integration for SI Brochure and Metrologia references
• 2025 — Continued expansion: CCSDS, IANA, XSF, Plateau; relaton-render for formatted citations
• 2026 — Relaton.org redesigned as a comprehensive documentation site