Provenace is about the source of an object or information or the processes that created it. For example, in the phsyical world, the provenance of an piece of antique furniture would include who designed and made it, who originally owned it, were it was bought and sold since. Computationally, we may want to store this kind of information about a data item as part of its meta-information, and there are semantic web standards for storing provenance in RDF. If the data item is refering to a phsyical thing (suc as antique furniture), then this may be exactly the kind of informationabove. For other kinds of data it may include the source of the data, how it was collected or what datsource it came from; this can help assess the reliability of the data. Outside the semantic web, during data preparation it is usually good to keep track of the processing steps that gave rise a to a particlar data file -- it is easy to forget! Provevance can also be important in explainable AI, in order to increase the transparency ofand hence trust in AI processes.
Used on pages 212, 392, 395