--- title: "Provenance" summary: "Provenance is the record of where each individual value came from — which source, retrieved when, effective when — attached to the value itself rather than to the dataset as a whole." canonical_url: https://entitybind.com/glossary/provenance last_updated: 2026-10-15 copy: full --- # Provenance > Provenance is the record of where each individual value came from — which source, retrieved when, effective when — attached to the value itself rather than to the dataset as a whole. Canonical page: https://entitybind.com/glossary/provenance Last updated: 2026-10-15 Glossary · Decisions and evidence ## How to read this The definition as the field writes it comes first, weaknesses and all. What Entity Bind does about it comes last, in its own paragraph, so you can take one without the other. [Filed under decisions and evidence](https://entitybind.com/glossary#decisions). By [James Rooney](https://entitybind.com/about), founder of Entity Bind · Last revised 15 October 2026 ## What provenance means Provenance is the record of where a value came from, carried on the value itself. Dataset-level provenance ('this came from a register feed') is nearly useless operationally, because the question is always about one field. Field-level provenance ('this registered address came from the Companies House snapshot of 1 August, whose own effective date is 14 June') is what lets a consumer assess a value, dispute it, or decide it is too old for the decision at hand. The distinction that catches people is between two clocks. The retrieval time is when we read the source; the effective date is when the source says the value was true. They are frequently months apart, and conflating them makes a freshly retrieved copy of an old value look new. A well-modelled fact carries both, and leaves the effective date null rather than defaulting it to the retrieval time when the source does not publish one. Provenance is also the mechanism by which licence obligations survive processing. A fact whose licence forbids storage can only be handled correctly if the licence travels attached to the fact — through the survivorship rules that pick a winning value, and into anything the system writes out. Entity Bind carries per-field provenance on every fact — source, retrieval time, the source's own effective date where it publishes one, and a licence tier — and assembles golden records with that provenance intact. Nothing is asserted without a traceable origin, and a value whose source cannot be named is not published as a fact. ## Where this shows up in Entity Bind Three pages where this term stops being vocabulary and starts changing an answer, a payload or a price. - [Register coverage](https://entitybind.com/coverage): The registers the resolver reads, the licence each one publishes under, and how often a live entity's name is unique once it is tidied to a common form. - [The audit pack](https://entitybind.com/audit-pack): The fixtures, the verdict logs and the replay path: what an evaluator needs to re-run a published rate for themselves. - [Reference data](https://entitybind.com/use-cases/reference-data): Identifier crosswalks, where each fact came from, and what a cited fact has to carry to be usable downstream. The fastest way past a definition is a file: which of your rows are the same company, which of your existing matches we would not have made, and what we could not decide. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## The terms next to this one Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one. - [Citation](https://entitybind.com/glossary/citation): A citation is a resolvable pointer to the specific source document or record that supports a claim, as distinct from a source name, which is only an attribution. - [Temporal facts](https://entitybind.com/glossary/temporal-facts): A temporal fact is a value stored with the period over which it was true and the history of when it was observed, rather than as a single current value that silently overwrites its predecessor. - [Golden record](https://entitybind.com/glossary/golden-record): A golden record is the single assembled view of an entity built by choosing one value per field from the records attached to it, ideally with the provenance of each choice carried alongside it. - [Licence tier](https://entitybind.com/glossary/licence-tier): A licence tier is the classification carried by an individual fact that determines what may lawfully be done with it — stored, redistributed, resold, or only shown once to the caller who asked. - [Decision receipt](https://entitybind.com/glossary/decision-receipt): A decision receipt is the durable, retrievable record of why a particular match was made — the features, the probability, the thresholds in force, the sources cited and the version of the pipeline that decided — addressable by an identifier returned with the answer. - [Survivorship](https://entitybind.com/glossary/survivorship): Survivorship is the set of rules that picks which value wins, field by field, when the records in a cluster disagree. ### Answered at length elsewhere - [KYB data requirements](https://entitybind.com/guides/kyb-data-requirements) (Guide): What a know-your-business onboarding flow actually needs, field by field, and which step is identity resolution. Explicitly not a screening, scoring or eligibility tool. - [OpenCorporates](https://entitybind.com/compare/opencorporates) (Comparison): An excellent register mirror. A register mirror is not a decision. ## The other 8 terms on this shelf What the system returns, what it refuses to return, and what a decision can be redeemed for afterwards. - [Confidence floor](https://entitybind.com/glossary/confidence-floor) - [Abstention](https://entitybind.com/glossary/abstention) - [Review queue](https://entitybind.com/glossary/review-queue) - [Decision receipt](https://entitybind.com/glossary/decision-receipt) - [Citation](https://entitybind.com/glossary/citation) - [Idempotency](https://entitybind.com/glossary/idempotency) - [Replay](https://entitybind.com/glossary/replay) - [Content fingerprint](https://entitybind.com/glossary/content-fingerprint) Previous, alphabetically: [Probabilistic matching](https://entitybind.com/glossary/probabilistic-matching) · Next, alphabetically: [PSC (person with significant control)](https://entitybind.com/glossary/psc) ## Evidence basis Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. ## Start with your own company records. Create your workspace, verify your email and run your first company file. The Free plan needs no card. Create API keys in your workspace when you need an integration. [Start free](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) · [All 64 terms](https://entitybind.com/glossary) 300 credits. No card. For a guided review of your file, explore [the Merge Safety Sprint](https://entitybind.com/audit-pack). --- Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure, emissions or geolocation, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. This is the Markdown copy of https://entitybind.com/glossary/provenance, assembled from the same data the page renders and carrying every sentence, table row, figure and question the page's main content carries. The HTML page is canonical; it adds the layout, the navigation and the interactive parts (the ask panel, the forms), which a copy can name but not run. Every page on the site, with a line on each: https://entitybind.com/llms.txt.