Knowledge Systems
Know where a fact came from before a system repeats it.
Track origin, permission, and confidence across knowledge as it moves into systems that act on it.
Knowledge entering an operating system arrives from somewhere: an expert interview, a policy document, a licensed corpus, a vendor feed, an earlier model output. Once it is inside, those origins tend to flatten into a single undifferentiated pool that a system draws on with equal confidence.
This is where trust quietly erodes. A superseded policy sits beside the current one. Material with restricted use travels into an output that leaves the building. A claim traces back to an earlier generated answer rather than to a source. None of that is visible until someone asks a question the record cannot answer.
Knowledge Provenance keeps origin attached. It gives the team a way to record where each element came from, what it may be used for, how confident the system should be in it, and when it was superseded — so that answers can be traced, permissions hold at the point of use, and stale material can be retired rather than quietly repeated.
Let’s get going
- Start where an answer would be hard to defend — Pick one output that someone might challenge and work backward. Whatever cannot be traced is where provenance needs to exist first.
- Separate sourced from generated — Mark which knowledge came from a source of record and which was produced by a system, so generated material does not quietly become evidence.
- Carry permission to the point of use — Usage terms belong on the element itself, checked where an answer is assembled, rather than in a licence document that is not consulted at runtime.
Outcomes
- Traceable answers — An output can be followed back to the material behind it rather than defended by assertion.
- Permissions that hold at runtime — What may be used where is enforced where the answer is assembled, not only where the agreement was signed.
- Retired knowledge stays retired — Superseded policy and stale material can be withdrawn from circulation instead of persisting alongside the current version.