Tracking: Provenance

Introduction

The W3C defines provenance as the:

Provenance is a record that describes the people, institutions, entities, and activities, involved in producing, influencing, or delivering a piece of data or a thing.

The definition goes on to state that this information:

can be used to form assessments about its quality, reliability or trustworthiness.

Provenance answers questions related to the who, what, why, when, where, and how and provides facilitation for claiming certainty and assessing validity of something. For example, if you are presented with data that supports a claim, the following questions are typically "where did the data come from?", "how was the data generated?" and "who generated it?". If these questions cannot be answered, the certainty of the data decreases since it is unknown how it came to be. However, if the data's provenance was captured such as when it was generated, what sources it was derived from, what steps were taken to capture, derive, and/or transform the data, and who performed the steps, the certainty of the data increases which enables assessing validity.