SECAI Core · phase 4 of 15
Data provenance
A record of the origin, history, and transformations of data
The Explain card
- Plain English
- Data provenance is the record of where data came from, its history, and every transformation applied to it along the way.
- Example
- A model card states that a training corpus came from a licensed news archive, was filtered for language, deduplicated, then sampled, with dates and tool versions for each step.
- Why it matters
- When a model misbehaves, provenance tells you which data source to suspect. It also answers legal and compliance questions about consent, licensing and whether poisoned sources slipped in.
- Hook
- The data's birth certificate and passport stamps.
Where it sits in the deck
Phase 4: Data Integrity, Governance, and Provenance
Once you know what data is, learn the principles that keep it trustworthy, traceable, and minimized throughout its lifecycle.
