--- title: The Provenance Chain as Product type: reference tags: :passepartout:architecture: --- * The Provenance Chain as Product :PROPERTIES: :ID: 2e3e576e-8839-4566-bae1-f40137428bb9 :ID: design-provenance-product :CREATED: [2026-05-10 Sun] :WEIGHT: 40 :END: In the coding domain, the value of the symbolic engine is the verified fact: "this command is safe." In the broader memex, the value is the provenance itself: "this claim originated in that diary entry on that date, has been referenced 7 times across 4 different projects, was contradicted in a retrospective 6 months later, and was revised in a note 3 weeks after that." The symbolic engine doesn't tell you what is true. It tells you what you wrote, when, where, and how it connects to everything else you wrote — with a verifiable audit trail. It is a memory prosthesis that makes your own mind legible to you. Every fact carries: - =:grounding= — the specific Org heading from which it was extracted - =:provenance= — who or what produced it (gate-outcome, human-authored, deduced, LLM-proposed) - =:timestamp= — when it was admitted to the symbolic index - =:referenced-by= — other facts that depend on or reference this one - =:contradicted-by= — other facts that disagree with this one (if any) - =:superseded-by= — if this fact was replaced by a newer version These fields make every fact auditable. The =/audit = command renders the full provenance chain as an Org headline tree. The provenance is not a logging feature. It is the product.