# Provenance fields for research data

Source: https://onco.cc/terms/provenance-fields/  
OnCo record `provenance-fields` (Term). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Provenance fields record where each data file came from and how it was processed (source, accession, pipeline version, genome build, date, checksum), so a result can be traced and reproduced.

## Summary

Data lineage is the tracking of how data is generated, transformed and used across systems, documenting its origins and movements so errors can be traced (Wikipedia). For genomic data the minimum fields are the source dataset and accession, the pipeline and its version, the genome build and annotation release, the download date and a checksum. Content-addressable storage takes the last step further by keying each raw file on the hash of its contents, so the same bytes are stored once and any change is detected (Wikipedia).

## Fields

- Kind: Term
- Last checked: 2026-09-24
- Also known as: provenance fields; data provenance; data lineage; pipeline version; source accession; checksum; sha256 manifest; content-addressed storage
- Tags: cansim-terms

## Notes

- Listed in the CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme; CanSim page path /terms/provenance-fields.

## Sources

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_lineage
- Wikipedia: content-addressable storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_lineage

## Connected records

- terms: [Analytical databases as a data catalogue (DuckDB, PostgreSQL)](https://onco.cc/terms/duckdb-catalog/), [Cancer AI vocabulary (CanSim terms map)](https://onco.cc/terms/cancer-ai-vocabulary/), [Ensembl gene ID](https://onco.cc/terms/ensembl-gene-id/), [Genome builds: GRCh38 versus hg19 (GRCh37)](https://onco.cc/terms/genome-builds/), [Reproducibility and negative results](https://onco.cc/terms/reproducibility/), [TCGA barcode](https://onco.cc/terms/tcga-barcode/), [Units of measurement ontology (UO)](https://onco.cc/terms/units-ontology/), [Zenodo DOIs for data and code](https://onco.cc/terms/zenodo-doi/)

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JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/provenance-fields.json