14 Provenance and governance§
AGREED
14.1 The provenance block§
| Field | Requirement |
|---|---|
assertedBy | REQUIRED. An agent with a kind of person, organization, system, or device, and a partyRef where the party is addressable. |
assertedAt | REQUIRED. Timestamp per 7.3. |
method | REQUIRED. measured, manual, commissioned, imported, derived, inferred, asserted, surveyed, or unknown. |
source | RECOMMENDED. A document, system, person, survey, device, drawing, or prior package. |
confidence | OPTIONAL. 0 to 1. Absence means unstated, NOT certain. |
approvals | OPTIONAL. Who signed off, when, in what role. |
changeReason, supersedes | OPTIONAL. Why the current assertion replaced its predecessor, and which one. |
method is required because it is the field that ages best. Thirty years on, knowing that a value was measured at commissioning rather than typed in from a drawing is often the difference between trusting it and re-surveying.
14.2 Change records§
A bus:ChangeRecord states that something changed: its subject, an operation, the time, the agent, a reason, and the revision it moved to. An exporter holding change history and omitting it MUST declare the provenance domain as partial.
NOTE Change records are not an audit log and need not be complete or contiguous. A partial change history is materially better than none, and a standard demanding completeness here would be ignored.
14.3 Provenance is not overwritten§
A package that has passed through three systems in twenty years carries three layers of provenance, and an operator can see which assertions have been touched by whom. That accumulation is the point.