Overview

Versioning, history, and provenance are first-order concepts within the HASH database, which provides:

1. →

   a complete record of all the changes to an entity or type over time (change tracking)

2. →

   the ability to inspect, access and even use older versions of an entity or type (versioning)

3. →

   the ability to see where information and changes came from, as well as what caused them (provenance)

In a world of increasingly AI-generated information, the ability to map the "supply chain" of your information and beliefs is critical, and amongst open-source tools only HASH is well-placed to help in this regard.

Using provenance metadata

Workers

Workers will use provenance data when providing you with information, including when answering your questions in chats, and when producing reports or other informational outputs in response to any goals you provide them with. Workers use provenance data to ensure that the answers they provide are accurately caveated, and can be introspected further when necessary. Rather than blindly tell you that things are or are not true with a false sense of certainty, provenance metadata is incorporated into answers to inform confidence-based judgements. This allows workers to answer thorny, real-world questions with nuanced understanding, and a level of accuracy more comparable to domain-experts than traditional AI bots. Provenance data forms a key part of helping users rely on worker's judgement in a manner similar to how they might a human analyst or co-worker, with a realistic sense of doubt appropriately conveyed, where the information required to arrive at a judgement is unclear or incomplete, or its provenance is less than certain. Because HASH is much more than just a "key-value store", in this way HASH workers can operate effectively under conditions of uncertainty where other AI agents fail.

Direct usage

In addition to AI being able to access and factor in provenance metadata, you can also view and access it directly to use it as part of your analysis. Simply head to the "Context" tab of a given entity or type to view its change history and any other available provenance metadata. This metadata is collected and made accessible web-wide.