Guiding Questions

Requirements & Use Cases

Purpose: Capture regulatory and business needs for data lineage to support compliance and value-added services.

1. Which legal, contractual, or sectoral requirements exist for provenance and traceability?

2. Are there AI Act or other regulatory triggers that mandate detailed data lineage or traceability?

3. Are there business cases for using provenance data to add value (e.g., sustainability claims, quality certification)?

Data Modelling

Purpose: Adopt or extend existing provenance ontologies to flexibly represent traceability information.

1. Will existing ontologies (e.g., W3C PROV-O, PAV) be adopted and extended for sector needs?

2. Should provenance be modelled as “events” (e.g., CloudEvents) for flexibility?

Storage & Management

Purpose: Define storage, retention, encryption, and access policies for provenance data across participants.

1. Will provenance/traceability data be stored locally by participants, by certified 3rd parties, or in a hybrid model?

2. What are the retention, encryption, and access control policies?

Observability Scope

Purpose: Clarify which processes and telemetry data should be observable for governance and monitoring purposes.

1. Which Control Plane activities (catalog publication, contract negotiation, transfer process) will be observable?

2. Will operational telemetry (uptime, performance) also be included under the same governance?

Trust & Third Parties

Purpose: Designate certified observability providers while avoiding centralization and systemic risks.

1. Which organisations could act as certified observability service providers?

2. How will centralization risks be mitigated?

Governance Linkages

Purpose: Integrate provenance and traceability rules into the rulebook under governance oversight.

1. How will rules for provenance and traceability be reflected in the rulebook?

2. Which governance body will approve changes to provenance and traceability standards or processes?