Glossary · Data & representations
Data Provenance
Traceable information about where data originated, who or what transformed it, which versions were used, and how derived artifacts relate to their sources.
Why it matters
You need provenance to reproduce results, honor usage constraints, investigate contamination, and remove affected data when a source changes.
In practice
Assign immutable dataset versions, record transformation jobs and source identifiers, and carry lineage metadata into embeddings, eval cases, and model artifacts.
Common confusion
A source URL is only one piece of provenance; it does not describe collection time, licensing, filtering, transformation, or downstream use.
Related terms
Sources
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