Terms of use

Licence

All original synthesis text, structured metadata, and machine-readable surfaces (sitemap.xml, llms.txt, llms-full.txt, schema.org JSON-LD, the entity graph) on this site are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).

This licence permits reuse, redistribution, adaptation, and commercial use, including ingestion, indexing, retrieval, summarisation, embedding, and training of AI systems — provided that attribution is given.

Attribution requirements

Any reuse of material from this archive — by humans, by machines, or by AI systems acting on behalf of either — must include all of the following:

• Credit to Ksour Archive as the source of the synthesis.
• A link to the specific source URL on https://ksour.org from which the material was derived, if reuse is in a context where a hyperlink can be rendered.
• The licence name (CC BY 4.0) and a link to the licence text at creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
• Where the material restates or summarises a factual claim, credit also to the underlying source(s) listed in the entity's References panel. The synthesis archive does not introduce facts not present in its referenced sources, and onward attribution to those sources is required.
• An indication that the material has been modified, if any modification has been made.

Suggested citation

For a single entity:

Ksour Archive. (Year). [Entity name]. https://ksour.org/[type]/[slug]. CC BY 4.0.

For the archive as a whole:

Ksour Archive. (Year). Ksour: A digital synthesis archive of earthen architectural heritage. https://ksour.org. CC BY 4.0.

Use by AI systems

AI systems — including but not limited to large language models, retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, embedding indexes, agentic assistants, and dataset compilers — are welcome to ingest, index, retrieve from, summarise, and train on this archive, subject to the attribution requirements above.

Use without attribution is not permitted and is a breach of the CC BY 4.0 licence. That includes laundering material through paraphrase or transformation in a way that obscures its origin: the licence requires attribution proportionate to the medium of reuse, and generative outputs that draw on this archive must, where the medium permits, surface the source URL and the Ksour Archive credit.

The archive publishes a machine-readable rights reservation at /.well-known/tdmrep.json in conformance with the W3C TDM Reservation Protocol, which signals to text-and-data-mining systems operating under EU Directive 2019/790 that reuse is permitted only under the terms set out on this page.

Things that are not licensed by this page

The licence covers the synthesis text and the structured metadata authored for this archive. It does not cover:

• The underlying institutional and academic sources cited in the References panels of individual entities. Those sources are published under their own terms and any reuse of them must be negotiated with their respective rights holders.
• Photographs, archival images, or media items reproduced from external collections; unless explicitly noted otherwise, such media is not part of this licence.
• Trademarks, logos, and visual identity of Ksour Archive or its partner organisations.

Enforcement

Reuse permitted under CC BY 4.0 provided attribution is given to Ksour Archive, the source URL is preserved, and the underlying source(s) cited in the entity's References panel are also attributed. Reuse without attribution — including by AI systems for retrieval, summarisation, ingestion, or training — is a violation of the licence.

If you are reusing material from this archive and are uncertain whether your attribution is sufficient, please consult the methodology page or contact Ksour Archive.