Provenance
The chain of pointers from a value on screen back to the government record that produced it, carried per field rather than per report.
The test of provenance is independence: can a skeptical reviewer, holding one number, retrieve the underlying document without calling the vendor? Report-level “sources” appendices fail that test structurally. Field-level provenance passes it, and it changes the economics of review, because a challenged number costs thirty seconds instead of an afternoon.
What the record actually contains
- Source system
- The office and dataset, named the way the office names it.
- Record id
- The document number in that office’s own scheme.
- Recorded date
- When the filing entered the record. Not when it was ingested.
- Epistemic status
- Filed fact, derived arithmetic, or scored inference, declared per field.
Jurisdiction notes
Not a legal term but an architectural one. The jurisdictional angle: a real citation names the specific index (ACRIS, a county Official Records book-and-page, a DOS filing) so a reviewer can pull the document from that office without interpretation.
Provenance is the product’s spine: it survives resolution, joins and export, so a CSV row or a dossier line can still be independently verified after it leaves the terminal.
See your market.
Twenty minutes on the live terminal.