I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but I am saying it must be jargon used within a particular community or minority subset of general stats/ machine learning/AI. honestly, I still think it's a database/ enterprise term because I've worked for our national statistics office and never heard it in the statistics community either. I have frequently heard data lineage however, but again, that's a database/ enterprise type person lingo: when people use that word I know immediately the background they're coming from.

Another poster mentioned vendor brochures and trade shows, which is in line with my expectations about which community it stems from, and also explains why I've never heard of it because I try to keep away from such environments these days.

Everywhere I've been the things which I take to make up "provenance" have generally been referred to under the simple label of "data quality", with separate subset definitions and measures such as timeliness, source, authority, format, history, suitability, verification, etc.

Of course, that's assuming people even worry about such things. In practice, let's be frank, anyone who's worked with data science knows they actually get shorter shrift than they deserve in practice: I'm probably among a minority of people in the real world who actually take things seriously, and I find myself on a constant crusade to remind people that just because a data point exists in a data set doesn't mean it's useful/ appropriate/ truthful/ unbiased.

data quality is a bit problematic, because I can see it being used by people who think provenance doesn't have any thing to do with quality, and from a variety of fields, but it is also infinitely more popular according to historical search trends, and in my last three jobs provenance would fall under the data quality framework.

TIL.

I’ve worked as a data engineer for the last two years and never heard of this being used in this context before.

Typically the word “data lineage” is used to mean this in my experience.

I don’t think I’ve ever been in a meeting where someone mentioned provenance except referring to a show about paintings.

Lineage isnt the same thing, being a more specific technical term referring to keeping the history of datasets and where they came from (basically), but people actually say the words “data governance” and “lineage”.

Another important use of data provenance is in GDPR. You have to be able to know the source of each data you use and be able to remove them from storage and backups at request.