Trace knowledge back to its sources, changes, and responsible actors.
Provenance connects a fact or result to the inputs and actions that produced it. Distinguish an imported assertion, a human correction, and a conclusion derived by a rule.
Signed changes identify their authors. Integrity checks make alterations detectable. Neither a signature nor an unchanged record proves that the original assertion was true.
A mortgage quote refers to the information used to calculate it, the applicable rules, and the responsible action. A reviewer can follow those references instead of reconstructing the decision from disconnected logs.
For inferred knowledge, trace the rule and premises behind the conclusion. See deductive AI.
A collateral eligibility answer can carry a third-party assessor's signed attestation without exposing the property file. The mortgage walkthrough separates verifiable lineage from trust in the assessment and its execution.
Domain events describe what changed, such as an agreement being accepted or a branch being merged. Connect the event to its actor, commit, and producing task when those records exist.
A failed attempt is not a successful business event. Operational progress and failures belong in end-to-end observability. The workspace controls access to its evidence just as it controls access to other knowledge.
Developer reference
Legra's PROV-O-compliant provenance model uses the W3C PROV-O ontology: prov:Entity for source/output artifacts, prov:Activity for producing operations, and prov:Agent for accountable actors. An illustrative import record:
@prefix prov: <http://www.w3.org/ns/prov#> .
@prefix ex: <https://example.org/> .
@prefix xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .
ex:result a prov:Entity ;
prov:wasDerivedFrom ex:source ;
prov:wasGeneratedBy ex:import .
ex:import a prov:Activity ;
prov:used ex:source ;
prov:wasAssociatedWith ex:agent ;
prov:atLocation ex:ingestSite ;
prov:endedAtTime "2026-10-17T10:00:00Z"^^xsd:dateTime .
ex:source a prov:Entity .
ex:agent a prov:SoftwareAgent .
ex:ingestSite a prov:Location .
Derivation evidence additionally identifies the rule, premises and input commit. Task/transaction IDs join this semantic lineage to execution evidence.
Merkle-tree hashing, generalized into a Merkle DAG, authenticates content transitively from a trusted root; hash chains bind commit ancestry; a signature authenticates the signing key. Verify referenced block hashes and commit signatures to mathematically establish that content and lineage match authenticated history, under the algorithms' cryptographic assumptions.
Source, time and place are provenance assertions. Hashing binds those assertions to the record; establishing wall-clock time or physical location requires a trusted attestation. Together, authenticated lineage and identifiable attesting authorities provide verifiable evidence for trust decisions. Workspace disclosure policies keep that evidence under its owner's control, making provenance part of data sovereignty.