A record that shows where data came from, what happened to it along the way, and where it ended up — like a passport stamp history for data.
A record that shows where data came from, what happened to it along the way, and where it ended up — like a passport stamp history for data.
Data lineage captures both technical lineage (system-to-system data flows, ETL transformations, pipeline operations) and business lineage (which business processes generate, consume, and transform data). In AI systems, lineage documentation allows teams to trace a model's prediction back to the training data that influenced it — supporting explainability, bias investigations, and regulatory audits. W3C PROV-O is a standard ontology for representing provenance and lineage relationships. The EU AI Act's Annex IV requires lineage-equivalent documentation for training and validation datasets.
Data platform teams investing in lineage tooling (e.g. Apache Atlas, OpenMetadata) create audit-ready documentation that dramatically reduces the effort of AI Act Annex IV compliance.
Like the chain of custody documentation in forensics — every person who handled evidence, every transformation it underwent, and every location it was stored is recorded to ensure its integrity can be verified.
A record that shows where data came from, what happened to it along the way, and where it ended up — like a passport stamp history for data.
Data lineage captures both technical lineage (system-to-system data flows, ETL transformations, pipeline operations) and business lineage (which business processes generate, consume, and transform data). In AI systems, lineage documentation allows teams to trace a model's prediction back to the training data that influenced it — supporting explainability, bias investigations, and regulatory audits. W3C PROV-O is a standard ontology for representing provenance and lineage relationships. The EU AI Act's Annex IV requires lineage-equivalent documentation for training and validation datasets.
Data platform teams investing in lineage tooling (e.g. Apache Atlas, OpenMetadata) create audit-ready documentation that dramatically reduces the effort of AI Act Annex IV compliance.