Definition
Provenance
Provenance is the origin and history of a piece of knowledge: where it came from, which revision it is, and in what form it was captured. In regulated work, a fact without its provenance is a fact you cannot rely on.
Provenance is the origin and history of a piece of knowledge: where it came from, which version it is, and in what form it was captured. A fact with provenance can be checked at its source. A fact without provenance is a claim you have to take on faith, which in regulated and safety-critical work is the same as a claim you cannot use.
Why does provenance matter for AI answers?
Because the same sentence can be right or wrong depending on where it came from. A specification that was superseded last year still reads as authoritative. A clause pulled from a draft is not the clause in the approved revision. When an AI answers from a corpus, the origin of each fact is part of the fact. Provenance is what lets a reader tell a current, approved source from a stale or unofficial one, instead of trusting that whatever the system retrieved was the version that should govern the decision.
How is provenance different from traceability?
Traceability is the path from an answer back to the passage that supports it. Provenance is what that passage is: its document, its revision, its authority, its form. Traceability gets you to the source. Provenance tells you whether the source is the one you should be standing on. You need both. An answer you can trace to a superseded document is traceable and still wrong to act on. Traceability has its own page.
How does the grounding service preserve provenance?
By keeping sources in their original form rather than quietly rewriting them. When a source is in another language, the grounding service shows the original text as the source of truth and marks any translation as secondary, because a small mistranslation of a statutory requirement can change what the requirement says. The same discipline applies to form: a fact is presented as it appears in the document it came from, with its origin attached, not smoothed into a version that reads well but no longer matches the record. In regulated work, the exact source is the point, and provenance is how the grounding service keeps it.
Related terms
- Traceability: following an answer back to the source whose provenance this describes.
- Grounding: answering from verified sources, with their origins intact.
- Ground truth: the verified knowledge whose provenance has to hold.