AI Governance Engineer
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Data provenance

By Updated

Information about the entities, activities and people involved in producing data, used to judge its quality and trustworthiness 1. In practice: where a dataset originally came from and on what terms (source, licence, lawful basis). Perfect lineage over unknown provenance is still ungoverned.

Developed in
ch. 14, Provenance versus lineage
ch. 12, Updating the policies you already have
Chapters
ch. 12, Governance Program · ch. 14, Development
Contrast with
Data lineage
Source
1 numbered reference, listed below

Commonly confused

  • Data provenance versus Data lineage

    Data provenance
    Information about the entities, activities and people involved in producing data, used to judge its quality and trustworthiness.
    Data lineage
    The record of how data moved and changed through an organisation's pipelines.

    The differenceWhere the data came from and on what terms, against the path it took through your own pipelines.

    Why it mattersPerfect lineage over unknown provenance is still ungoverned; erasure and disgorgement need both.

Where it is used

2 chapters of the Body of Knowledge use the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

  • Lawful basis

    One of the six grounds in GDPR Article 6 that make processing of personal data lawful: consent, contract, legal obligation, vital interests, public task and…

Sources

  1. [1] PROV Overview (PROV-DM and PROV-O W3C Recommendations of 30 April 2013; provenance as information about the entities, activities and people involved in producing data). W3C. 2013-04-30. https://www.w3.org/TR/prov-overview/ (verified: primary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Data provenance. In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/data-provenance. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026dataprovenance,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Data provenance}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/data-provenance}
}