codexproof

glossary / PROV-AGENT

an e-Science 2025 extension of W3C PROV that models AI-agent workflows - prompts, tool calls, model versions, agent interactions - as unified provenance graphs across agent frameworks.

w3c-provdag
PROV-AGENT - The triangle extended to agents: same Entity-Activity-Agent vocabulary, but resting on trusted infrastructure rather than signatures

The triangle extended to agents: same Entity-Activity-Agent vocabulary, but resting on trusted infrastructure rather than signatures.

Etymology and backstory

PROV plus AGENT - the W3C vocabulary carried into the agent era by Souza and colleagues in the scientific-workflow provenance community, where tracking what a computation did has been a first-class problem since long before LLMs.

Ecosystem

the scientific-workflow provenance lineage, agent observability and tracing tools, and the survey literature on agent trace provenance.

In codexproof

the Related Work delta in one clause - PROV-AGENT extends PROV to agentic workflows but trusts its infrastructure: no signatures, no cross-domain verification. Same vocabulary, no cryptographic binding, so its graph is exactly as trustworthy as the database that stores it. The paper's move binds the same typed links into content-ids under signatures, so the graph itself survives hostile custody - the difference between a record and evidence.

"PROV-AGENT writes the agent's diary; we notarize it - same vocabulary, but only one of them survives a hostile courier."
References: Souza et al., PROV-AGENT: Unified provenance for tracking AI agent interactions in agentic workflows, IEEE e-Science (2025), arXiv:2508.02866.

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