provenancethat

Provenancethat is a conceptual framework and practice that seeks to attach explicit provenance information to every factual assertion within a document or dataset. The term combines provenance, the history of origin and modification, with that, signaling that a claim is accompanied by a traceable justification. It is used to improve accountability, verifiability, and trust in digital content.

The approach emphasizes assertion-level provenance, metadata about who asserted a claim, when, and from which sources the claim derives. Implementations typically rely on structured provenance models (often drawing on the W3C PROV data model), content-addressable storage, version histories, timestamps, and cryptographic attestations to deter tampering.

Provenancethat finds potential in journalism, scientific publishing, and legal or policy documents, as well as in knowledge graphs and digital humanities projects. A typical workflow attaches a provenance block to each claim, listing author identity, publication date, source documents, retrieval dates, confidence level, and a link to verifiable evidence.

Challenges include increased authoring burden, privacy considerations, interoperability among systems, scalability, and the need for clear standards. Critics argue that provenance alone cannot guarantee accuracy, and that user-friendly tooling is essential to avoid overwhelming readers with technical metadata.