Citations and provenance
Every number carries its source, licence, retrieval date and dataset version.
Every tool response carries three things next to the data: citations, caveats and
dataset_version. Show the citations and caveats whenever you quote a number.
The citation object
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
source_id | Stable id of the source, the same one used on the coverage page |
name | Dataset name |
publisher | Who publishes the data |
url | Where the publisher describes it (can be null) |
licence | The licence as recorded, even when it is unclear |
commercial_use | Whether the licence allows commercial use: yes, no or unclear |
attribution | The text to print when you publish the number |
retrieved_at | The date we retrieved the data |
dataset_version | The version of the dataset behind the number |
A real response
This is a citation exactly as the query_metrics tool returned it for the population of one
municipality. It was produced against the synthetic test dataset, so the name says [FIXTURE] and
the value is not a real statistic; production responses name the real source.
{
"source_id": "worldpop_population",
"name": "[FIXTURE] WorldPop Constrained Population 100 m (R2025A)",
"publisher": "WorldPop, University of Southampton",
"url": "https://www.worldpop.org/",
"licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
"commercial_use": "yes",
"attribution": "WorldPop (www.worldpop.org), University of Southampton. CC BY 4.0.",
"retrieved_at": "2026-11-05",
"dataset_version": "fixture-2026.11.05"
}Each row of a result lists the source_ids behind it, so you can tell which citation belongs to
which value. When a value was converted between geographies, is_estimate is true and method
says how. See Tool reference for full responses and get_provenance for a metric's
publisher, licence, method and lineage.