Source trail

Provenance connecting an artifact or claim to the source records, versions, passages, transformations, and checks that produced it.

A useful trail may include a document identifier, version, timestamp, page or span, extraction step, and later transformation. The original source is not automatically correct or authoritative, and a link alone does not show that the passage supports the claim. The trail makes those questions inspectable.

Builder example

Decision-relevant and unstable claims benefit from exact support and versioning. Creative transformations may need source attribution without sentence-level citations. The system should preserve enough provenance for the downstream use and its consequences rather than attach noisy links to every word.

Common confusion: A source trail links a claim to the evidence it came from. Personal retrieval is the act of asking your records a question; the source trail is the citation the answer carries back. Retrieval without a source trail returns an answer you still have to trust on faith.