Provenance & Source Authority
Our knowledge layer preserves the origin and authority of information so that answers can be traced back to the records that support them.
Company systems disagree
A CRM, accounting platform, contract, email, and manually maintained spreadsheet can all contain different values for what appears to be the same fact. The system should not collapse those conflicts into an untraceable model assertion.
Provenance
For information that participates in higher-level reasoning, provenance can include:
- Source system
- Original record reference
- Source lineage
- Update time
- Evidence chain
- Transformation history
- Relationship to canonical entities
This allows downstream output to preserve the distinction between what the system inferred and what the underlying sources actually contain.
Source authority
Not every source should have equal authority for every fact. The authoritative system for a financial transaction may differ from the authoritative system for a customer commitment or employee role.
Our architecture can therefore preserve source hierarchy by fact class rather than treating authority as a single global ranking. When sources conflict, the correct behavior may be to:
- Prefer the authoritative source
- Retain the conflicting record
- Expose the discrepancy
- Reduce confidence
- Route the conflict for investigation
Silently choosing whichever value was retrieved first is not an acceptable conflict-resolution strategy.
Evidence-backed reasoning
Provenance also supports inspection after the system has produced an answer. A decision, alert, or investigation can retain references to the records that contributed to it. This is particularly important when a model is synthesizing information across multiple systems.
Confidence is not a replacement for evidence. A high-confidence model response can still be unsupported.
The objective is therefore an architecture in which important conclusions can be connected back through an evidence chain to the source records and authority assumptions underneath them. That gives the broader system something more useful than fluent answers: answers whose factual basis can be inspected, challenged, and audited.
Scope
This page is the data-layer responsibility: capturing lineage at the moment of ingest — which system asserted a value, when, and in what form — so that a later answer has something to be traced back to. Provenance that is not recorded on the way in cannot be reconstructed afterwards.
Deciding which source wins a conflict, and showing that reasoning inside an answer, is the knowledge layer’s job: see Source Authority for how authority is determined per fact, and Knowledge Provenance for how the evidence chain is carried through to a conclusion.