provenance [English]

InterPARES Definition

n. ~ IP2, Archives · The relationships between records and the organizations or individuals that created, accumulated and/or maintained and used them in the conduct of personal or corporate activity.

Other Definitions

  • IP2 Dictionary (†242 s.v. "provenance"): n., The relationships between records and the organizations or individuals that created, accumulated and/or maintained and used them in the conduct of personal or corporate activity. [Archives]
  • IP2 Glossary (†386 IP2 Glossary, s.v. "provenance"): The relationships between records and the organizations or individuals that created, accumulated and/or maintained and used them in the conduct of personal or corporate activity.
  • SAA Glossary 2005 (†241 s.v. "provenance"): n. (provenancial, adj.) ~ 1. The origin or source of something. - 2. Information regarding the origins, custody, and ownership of an item or collection. Notes: Provenance is a fundamental principle of archives, referring to the individual, family, or organization that created or received the items in a collection. The principle of provenance or the respect des fonds dictates that records of different origins (provenance) be kept separate to preserve their context.
  • W3C Provenance Incubator Group 2010 (†381 n.p. (Referenced in Yeo 2013, 7) ): [Data/e-Science] 2.1 A Working Definition of Provenance ¶ Provenance is a very broad topic that has many meanings in different contexts. The W3C Provenance Incubator Group developed a working definition of provenance on the Web: ¶ Provenance of a resource is a record that describes entities and processes involved in producing and delivering or otherwise influencing that resource. Provenance provides a critical foundation for assessing authenticity, enabling trust, and allowing reproducibility. Provenance assertions are a form of contextual metadata and can themselves become important records with their own provenance.

Citations

  • Furht and Escalante 2010 (†583 p.15): It has been said that science without reproducibility is not science, yet in a world where data and computations are passed around the intricate cloud, provenance is all to easy to lose track of. (†1208)
  • Furht and Escalante 2010 (†583 p.323): Data provenance in workflows is a kind of important metadata, in which the dependencies between datasets are recorded (Simmhan, Plale, & Gannon, 2005). The dependency depicts the derivation relationship between the application datasets. In cloud workflow systems, after the execution of tasks, some intermediate datasets may be deleted to save the storage cost, but sometimes they have to be regenerated for either reuse or reanalysis (Bose & Frew, 2005). Data provenance records the information of how the datasets have been generated. Furthermore, regeneration of the intermediate datasets from the input data may be very time consuming, and therefore carry a high computation cost. With data provenance information, the regeneration of the demanding dataset may start from some stored intermediated datasets instead. In a cloud workflow system, data provenance is recorded during workflow execution. Taking advantage of data provenance, we can build an Intermediate data Dependency Graph (IDG) based on data provenance (Yuan et al., 2010). (†1209)
  • International Records Management Trust 2009 (†572 s.v. provenance): In a records and archives environment, the organisation or individual that created or received, maintained and used records while they were still current. (†1056)
  • NIST 2013 (†734 p. B-17): The records describing the possession of, and changes to, components, component processes, information, systems, organization, and organizational processes. Provenance enables all changes to the baselines of components, component processes, information, systems, organizations, and organizational processes, to be reported to specific actors, functions, locales, or activities. (†1824)
  • W3C PROV-DM (†385 ): "Provenance is information about entities, activities, and people involved in producing a piece of data or thing, which can be used to form assessments about its quality, reliability or trustworthiness." (†418)
  • Wikipedia (†387 s.v. provenance): Provenance (from the French provenir, "to come from"), is the chronology of the ownership, custody, or location of a historical object.[OED] The term was originally mostly used in relation to works of art, but is now used in similar senses in a wide range of fields, including archaeology, paleontology, archives, manuscripts, printed books, and science and computing. The primary purpose of tracing the provenance of an object or entity is normally to provide contextual and circumstantial evidence for its original production or discovery, by establishing, as far as practicable, its later history, especially the sequences of its formal ownership, custody, and places of storage. The practice has a particular value in helping authenticate objects. (†1046)
  • Yeo 2013 (†380 p. 5): Broadly speaking, the principle of provenance requires records and archives to be managed in a way that secures and preserves knowledge of their origins and the circumstances of their creation. (†773)