Provenance fields for research data

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).