Provenance: a plea
I was talking to some friends that run a nonprofit called
Cultural Heritage Imaging. We
had one of those
wouldn't it be cool if discussions about
one of my favorite words:
provenance. This usually refers to the history
(particularly of ownership) of an object. Wouldn't it be cool if
file formats of all kinds had provisions for recording the
provenance of a file? For example, wouldn't be cool if the EXIF
header standard for JPEG (and other) files had a place for
historical information? So that Photoshop and other imaging
applications could record and least a summary of what was done to
the file? This would be vaguely like what happens with mod
histories in source control systems like CVS and SCCS, but
integrated with the data, supported by the tools that do the
modifications, carried with the file as it gets moved from place to
place, and more automatic.
