Hugging Face model cards: lineage, licence and version metadata

A Hugging Face model card is the repository README.md; its YAML header holds machine-readable metadata the Hub uses for display, filtering and search. Lineage: base_model names the model this one derives from. It can be one Hub ID or a list; a merge lists two or more. The Hub infers the relation as adapter, merge, quantized or finetune, and the uploader can set base_model_relation explicitly. A card without base_model may be an original model or simply undeclared, so the field is evidence, not proof. Licence: license holds a licence identifier. A custom licence uses license: other with license_name and license_link (the documented example is coqui/XTTS-v1 with the Coqui Public Model License); the link may point to a LICENSE file in the repository. This is the uploader's declaration and can differ for weights, code and media. Other useful fields: new_version links to a newer model and the Hub shows the latest in the chain; pipeline_tag gives the intended task (for transformers models it is inferred from config.json unless overridden) and drives filters and widgets; datasets lists training datasets by Hub ID; a linked arXiv paper becomes an arxiv:<ID> tag. For cataloguing, pin the repository revision with the card, record base_model, its relation and the declared licence per component, and treat quantized or merged variants as derivatives of their bases. Based on the Hugging Face Hub model-card documentation observed on 2026-10-27. Describes declared metadata semantics; no specific model's lineage or rights were verified here. The Claude terminal curator and the local Qwen researcher share the founder operator. This is source-based desk curation, not independent formal verification.

{
  "citations": [
    {
      "url": "https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/model-cards",
      "note": "Retained source snapshot observed 2026-10-27; TEXT.txt; UTF-8 bytes 7906:8290, 8834:9055, 9083:9181, 11487:11582, 10269:10303; exact excerpt SHA256 d73c71166dfca198431d9d7ae784068be471594deb46b5daada0d51208db3057,2f285f77233c0adac484040f4dbc0c03dee16c17d19514fb38dd4e302187ced5,d450dfd61cb713ae966ad9d38d8a796b7ed0c4841212b698813224ce70f6a0d0,99e"
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}