{"id": "TTC-109", "slug": "knowledge-and-provenance", "title": "Knowledge and provenance", "level": "practitioner", "summary": "Store each usable fact or rule with its origin, owner, date, scope, status, and relationship to the source so it can be challenged and retired.", "learning_outcome": "Create a provenance record that lets another person trace a rule to its exact source, scope, owner, and review state.", "explanation": "Knowledge becomes governable when a reviewer can answer: who asserted this, from which artifact and passage, when, for what scope, and with what approval state? Preserve the original separately from summaries and derived rules. Use stable identifiers and checksums where integrity matters. Mark proposed, active, superseded, disputed, and retired states explicitly; a newer file is not automatically more authoritative. When sources conflict, retain both and record the resolution. Provenance enables review and rollback, but it does not prove that the source itself is correct.", "worked_example": "Fictional case: a Harbor Library response-time rule links to policy HL-7, section 3, revision 4, approved by the service lead on 2026-09-12. A staff note proposing a faster target remains \u2018proposed\u2019 and cannot silently replace HL-7. The record shows both and names the pending decision.", "exercise": "Using fictional files, create five knowledge records: direct fact, paraphrase, derived rule, correction, and conflict. Give each a stable ID, source passage, publisher or owner, date, scope, status, and supersession link. Ask a peer to reconstruct one record without opening your notes.", "success_criteria": ["Every active record resolves to an identifiable source and exact location or explicit teacher decision.", "Original, transformed, proposed, active, disputed, superseded, and retired states remain distinguishable.", "A reviewer can identify the applicable rule and explain why conflicting material did not override it."], "limitations": ["Detailed provenance increases accountability but also creates metadata that may itself require privacy protection.", "Source age and authority need domain judgment; no metadata schema can determine truth automatically."], "prerequisites": ["TTC-103", "TTC-108"], "next_lessons": ["TTC-110", "TTC-111", "TTC-118"], "copyable_material": "# TTC-109 \u2014 Knowledge and provenance\nObjective: Make every usable fact and rule traceable, scoped, and reviewable.\nProcedure: Assign a stable ID; record source, passage, owner, date, transformation, scope, status, and supersession.\nRequired evidence: Keep originals apart from summaries and preserve conflict and approval records.\nBoundaries: Newer, longer, or more confident material does not override authority; unresolved conflicts must remain visible.\nCompletion test: A reviewer can reconstruct an active rule and its history from the record alone.\nReview rule: Treat generated work as a draft until the named human reviewer accepts it.", "sources": [{"title": "PROV-DM: The PROV Data Model", "publisher": "World Wide Web Consortium", "url": "https://www.w3.org/TR/prov-dm/"}, {"title": "DCMI Metadata Terms", "publisher": "Dublin Core Metadata Initiative", "url": "https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/dcmi-terms/"}], "version": "1.0.0", "reviewed_on": "2026-10-03", "review_status": "reviewed", "next_review_criteria": "The curriculum metadata or provenance schema gains, removes, or redefines a required field.; A cited primary source is materially revised, replaced, or becomes unavailable.; Repeated learner results show that the exercise or success criteria are ambiguous.", "canonical_aliases": ["/agent-memory/"], "canonical_url": "https://teachthecompany.com/school/knowledge-and-provenance/"}