provenance

Provenance

Provenance is not metadata in this framework. It is the artifact. Every signal, memory entry, report, decision, audit entry, and visibility change carries the chain of producers that brought it into being.

The Signal primitive

interface Signal<T> {
  value: T;
  confidence: number;          // ∈ [0, 1]
  provenance: Provenance;
}

interface Provenance {
  producedBy: ProducerRef;     // AgentId | ReviewerId | IngestionAdapterId | SystemRef
  producedAt: string;          // ISO-8601
  rationale: string;           // short, human-readable
  derivedFrom: ProvenanceRef[];// recursive lineage
}

A Signal<T> is the unit of observation that crosses every module boundary. There is no "raw value" path — even ingested evidence is wrapped in a signal whose provenance points to the ingestion adapter.

Lineage is recursive

derivedFrom lets the framework reconstruct the full lineage of any artifact:

report
 └─ derivedFrom: [synthesisOutput]
      └─ derivedFrom: [signalA, signalB, signalC]
           ├─ signalA.derivedFrom: [ingestedEvidence1]
           ├─ signalB.derivedFrom: [ingestedEvidence2, reviewerNote5]
           └─ signalC.derivedFrom: [ingestedEvidence3]

You can walk the chain in the console (decision inspector, memory page, reports page) or programmatically via framework.shared.lineage(...).

Where provenance appears

Artifact	Provenance carrier
Ingested evidence	adapter id, ingest time, source URI / payload hash
Normalized signal	adapter id + normalizer rule, derived from raw ingest
Memory entry	source agent id + skill id, derived from the signals that produced the entry
Cognition synthesis	the agents and signals that contributed
Fit assessment	the candidate and organization subgraph that supported it
Reviewer note	reviewer id, session id, signed action id
Override	reviewer id, capability used, previous state, justification
Visibility change	reviewer id, reason, previous level
Access decision	rule-by-rule trace + reviewer id + session id
Audit entry	reviewer id (or null for system actions), sequence number, frozen on append

Why provenance is data

Three reasons:

1. Accountability. Years later you can ask "why did we hire X" and reconstruct the answer from evidence with named producers, not from a model's softmax.
2. Replayability. Provenance is the substrate of determinism. If a contributor changes a downstream module, the upstream lineage tells reviewers exactly what changed.
3. Calibration. The evaluation layer needs to attribute outcomes to specific producers (which reviewer's signals predicted well? which agent overconfidence held?). Without provenance, this attribution is guesswork.

Provenance integrity

The framework enforces provenance through a combination of:

• Types. Public functions that produce artifacts require a producer argument.
• Runtime checks. Engines reject inputs missing required provenance fields.
• Audit. Provenance gaps are themselves audit events; they cannot be hidden.
• Benchmarks. The cognition suite's provenance guard fails when an artifact lacks a complete chain.

Anti-patterns

These are explicitly forbidden in the framework:

• Anonymous producers. No "system" placeholder for an artifact that was actually produced by an agent or reviewer.
• Backfilled provenance. Writing an artifact without provenance and adding it later. The artifact does not exist until it has provenance.
• Provenance erasure. Replacing a producer reference during reconciliation. The reconciliation is its own producer; the original signal's producer stays.
• Cross-org producer impersonation. A reviewer from one organization producing artifacts in another. The security layer denies this at the boundary.

Reading the lineage in the console

• Memory page → click an entry → see the signals it was derived from.
• Reports page → click a report → see the synthesis output that produced it, then the signals beneath that.
• Security → Decision inspector → see the full rule trace and the reviewer + session that authored the request.
• Operations → Investigation detail → see the hypotheses, the supporting evidence, and the adversarial probes attached to each.