Citation format

Every passage returned by the gateway carries a canonical citation in the society's preferred format. The citation appears in three places in a typical response:

1. As a string field on each passage (citation).
2. As structured fields (society, standard, section) for downstream rendering.
3. As a citation chip in the rendered docs and product UI (the visual pattern shown below).

The chip

Inline, the citation appears as a monospace chip:

[ASME B31.3 §304.1.2]

The standard identifier is underlined in Provenance Blue. The section path is set in Slate. The brackets are decorative and not announced to assistive technology.

String format

The string form is a single line, suitable for embedding in agent responses:

[ASME B31.3 §304.1.2]
[NFPA 70 art. 250]
[ICC IBC ch. 16]
[ASCE 7-22 ch. 12]

Square brackets, society identifier, standard identifier, section path. Order is fixed. Whitespace is significant.

Structured form

The structured form is the safer choice for downstream rendering. The fields map one-to-one with the canonical identifier system used by the source society:

{
  "society": "ASME",
  "standard": "B31.3",
  "section": "§304.1.2",
  "citation": "[ASME B31.3 §304.1.2]",
  "edition_year": 2022,
  "section_path": ["304", "1", "2"]
}

section_path is the parsed form of the section identifier, useful for hierarchical navigation.

Edition handling

Standards revise on a fixed cadence. Citehouse pins each call to the edition contracted with the society. The edition_year field is included in the structured form and the gateway will not return passages from a non-contracted edition.

If a builder customer needs explicit cross-edition retrieval (e.g., comparing ASME B31.3-2018 to B31.3-2022), pass editions: ["2018", "2022"] in the call.

Format per society

The default format is [<society> <standard> <section>]. A handful of societies prefer a different format and the gateway honors their preference automatically:

| Society | Format example | | --- | --- | | ASME | [ASME B31.3 §304.1.2] | | SAE | [SAE J1939-21:2024 §5.2] | | ACI | [ACI 318-19 §22.5] | | AWWA | [AWWA M11 ch. 4] | | NFPA | [NFPA 70 art. 250] | | ICC | [ICC IBC 2024 §1605.1] |

The string field always carries the society's preferred format. The structured fields are normalized.

Why citations matter

The citation block is the load-bearing trust signal of the entire gateway. End-user professional engineers trust the agent's answer to the degree they trust the citation. The citation must read as authoritative and be checkable against the society's own catalog.

Citehouse runs an eval harness nightly against a held-out test set per corpus. Citation correctness is a published number for each society and lives at /standards/[society]/eval. If correctness drops below the contractual floor, builder customers receive automatic SLA credits on the next invoice.