Provenance
Provenance is the recorded origin of a piece of information: who said it, in what context, on what date. In a knowledge system, full provenance (also called source attribution) means every statement can be traced back to its source and verified.
What is provenance?
Provenance is what separates knowledge from hearsay. A claim with provenance — "said by the plant manager, project meeting, 12 March" — can be checked, weighed and, if needed, corrected at the source. A claim without it hardens into "the system says so," which is folklore with a user interface.
Not to be confused with a bibliography. Citations point to published works; provenance in a knowledge base points to the actual utterance — the specific meeting or session — and is attached to every statement, not just the contested ones.
Why it matters for SME continuity
Trust is the adoption bottleneck for any knowledge system in an SME. Teams will not act on answers they cannot verify, and they are right not to. Provenance also protects the expert: his digital knowledge copy says only what he actually said, and anyone can confirm it.
Provenance inside MentX
Full source attribution is one of MentX's four trust anchors: every statement in the knowledge graph carries its origin, and every DigiME answer shows its sources with dates. Disagreements get settled by opening the source, not by arguing with a system. See trust, privacy & governance.