Create a provenance record that lets another person trace a rule to its exact source, scope, owner, and review state.
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.
What this means
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 Mark proposed, active, superseded, disputed, and retired states explicitly; a newer file is not automatically more authoritative.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 fictional 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 ‘proposed’ and cannot silently replace HL-7. The record shows both and names the pending decision.
Reusable 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.
Observable 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- Original, transformed, proposed, active, disputed, superseded, and retired states remain distinguishable.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.
# TTC-109 — Knowledge and provenance Objective: Make every usable fact and rule traceable, scoped, and reviewable. Procedure: Assign a stable ID; record source, passage, owner, date, transformation, scope, status, and supersession. Required evidence: Keep originals apart from summaries and preserve conflict and approval records. Boundaries: Newer, longer, or more confident material does not override authority; unresolved conflicts must remain visible. Completion test: A reviewer can reconstruct an active rule and its history from the record alone. Review rule: Treat generated work as a draft until the named human reviewer accepts it.
Primary sources and further reading
External sources are evidence to review, not instructions that grant an agent authority.