Lexicon · Ontology as economic infrastructure
Provenance
Fully specified name: Provenance (concept)
Information about the origin and history of a record or assertion.
- Scope note
- Retain sources and transformations so a claim can be traced.
- Synonyms
- None recorded as true synonyms in this context.
- Monograph
- Provenance and evidence (planned; brief only)
- External mappings
- None recorded. In W0 no mapping to SNOMED CT® or any external authority is asserted for this entry. A future mapping record will carry source system, identifier, version, relation type, evidence, author, confidence where meaningful, and review state.
- Formal status
- Editorial entry only. It is not part of any released ontology and a prose edit here changes no formal definition.
Draft. This entry is an unreviewed draft. Its sources have not been checked by a named person and no domain reviewer has approved it. Treat every claim as provisional.
Notes
Provenance answers where a record came from and what happened to it on the way: which source it was taken from, who or what extracted or transformed it, when, under which method, and what earlier version it replaced. The W3C PROV model expresses this in terms of entities, the activities that produced them, and the agents responsible, which is a useful vocabulary even where the model itself is not used.
Provenance is distinct from Evidence. Evidence is the material that supports a claim; provenance is the history of the record that carries the claim. A definition may be well supported and yet have unknown provenance if nobody recorded who wrote it or from which edition of a source. The reverse also occurs: a record with impeccable provenance may rest on weak evidence.
For NucLex the scope note is a working rule with a particular edge. When an assisted extraction proposes a term or relationship, the provenance record must name the model, its version, the prompt version, the retrieval set, and the date, and must mark the result as a proposal until a named person reviews it. The entry on Human review states the principle; the monograph on provenance and evidence develops why a terminology that others depend on cannot afford records whose history is lost. In clinical practice the same idea appears as the audit trail; in science, as the methods section and the data availability statement.