Definition
The systematic tracking of a data chunk's origin, transformation history, and movement across the RAG lifecycle, from source ingestion to its final inclusion in an LLM context window. While essential for auditability and mitigating hallucinations, maintaining granular provenance introduces significant metadata storage overhead and increased processing latency.
Focuses on 'where it came from' (lineage) rather than 'is it correct' (veracity) or 'who can see it' (privacy).
"A digital forensic breadcrumb trail leading from a specific sentence in a generated answer back to a highlighted paragraph in a 500-page source PDF."
- Source Attribution(Component)
- Metadata Filtering(Prerequisite)
- Hallucination Detection(Downstream Application)
Conceptual Overview
The systematic tracking of a data chunk's origin, transformation history, and movement across the RAG lifecycle, from source ingestion to its final inclusion in an LLM context window. While essential for auditability and mitigating hallucinations, maintaining granular provenance introduces significant metadata storage overhead and increased processing latency.
Disambiguation
Focuses on 'where it came from' (lineage) rather than 'is it correct' (veracity) or 'who can see it' (privacy).
Visual Analog
A digital forensic breadcrumb trail leading from a specific sentence in a generated answer back to a highlighted paragraph in a 500-page source PDF.