Depove

Depove is a term used to describe a family of concepts and protocols for recording, storing, and verifying the provenance of digital data and assets in distributed systems. The term is often defined as decentralized provenance, though its exact scope varies by community. Generally, depove systems seek to create tamper-evident provenance records that allow users to trace an item's origin, custody, and transformations without relying on a single trusted party.

Technical approach: depove typically relies on append-only provenance logs, cryptographic hashes, and proofs such as Merkle proofs to enable tamper-evident auditing. Some implementations anchor provenance records to public blockchains or other immutable backbones to enhance cross-system verifiability. A provenance graph or schema represents relationships between original data items and subsequent derivations, enabling lineage queries like what transformed this data and who accessed it when. Privacy controls are often incorporated through selective disclosure or privacy-preserving proofs.

Applications: depove has been proposed for research data management, supply chain tracking of digital assets, media rights and attribution, and governance of distributed AI models. By enabling cross-domain trust, depove aims to reduce data fraud, improve reproducibility, and streamline audits.

Challenges: adoption faces standardization gaps, performance overhead, and privacy trade-offs. Interoperability between different depove implementations remains a key area of work, as does developing common schemas and proof formats.

See also: data provenance, provenance, blockchain, cryptographic proof, verifiable computation.