Evidence provenance
Kanıt kökeni
D4
Evidence provenance is recorded information that makes an evidence item's origin, derivation, handling, and connection to a claim inspectable.
Review status: 2026-11-26
Technical explanation
It links evidence to the entities, activities, and agents involved in producing or handling it and to the claim or decision it supports.
Conceptual boundaries
Evidence provenance is not merely citation presence; direct support, faithfulness, completeness, and sufficiency require separate evaluation.
Provider-neutral example
For an evaluation claim, a record can identify the dataset version, its source and transformation, the scoring run, the reviewer, and the exact report section that uses the result.
Limitations
A recorded provenance trail does not itself establish direct support or sufficiency for an inference.
Related concepts
Atomic claims and evidence
1.1W3C PROV-DM: The PROV Data Model
- Source
- W3C PROV-DM: The PROV Data Model
- Source role
- Authoritative source
- Exact locator
- Introduction; Sections 2.1.2-2.1.3 and 5.2-5.3
- Supported claim
- The W3C PROV model uses entities, activities, and agents and includes derivation, attribution, association, and delegation relations.
- Last verification
- Review due
- Scope limitation
- PROV is a general provenance model; it does not define a complete evidentiary standard for every AI claim.
2.1W3C PROV-Overview
- Source
- W3C PROV-Overview
- Source role
- Authoritative source
- Exact locator
- Section 1, provenance framework recommendations
- Supported claim
- W3C's PROV overview identifies identification, attribution, processing steps, reproducibility, versioning, procedures, and derivation as provenance-framework needs.
- Last verification
- Review due
- Scope limitation
- These provenance needs improve inspectability; they do not themselves prove that a claim is true or relevant.
3.1NIST, Building Evaluation Probes for Agentic AI
- Source
- NIST, Building Evaluation Probes for Agentic AI
- Source role
- Authoritative source
- Exact locator
- Overview; Objectives; Approach — factual-claim/reference-document comparison, structured audit trails, and citation-quality dimensions
- Supported claim
- NIST's evaluation-probe project uses structured audit trails to map agent decisions to supporting evidence and separately evaluates citations for faithfulness, completeness, and sufficiency.
- Last verification
- Review due
- Scope limitation
- This describes an evaluation approach and does not make every recorded provenance relation direct support for a claim.