A practical, engineering-first guide to tracing spatial data — from acquisition to audit.
Origin tracking, transformation audit trails, compliance mapping, and Python pipeline integration for production GIS.

🌐 Read the guide →

provenance-tracking.com is an open reference library for building provenance and lineage into geospatial data systems. Every coordinate reference system change, raster resampling, vector merge, and multi-agency handoff leaves a trail — this site shows you how to capture that trail so it holds up under a compliance audit, a reproducibility check, or a freedom-of-information request.

The material is written for people who actually build and operate spatial pipelines. It favours runnable Python, real PostGIS and Cypher, concrete failure modes, and control-to-field mapping tables over abstract theory. Diagrams are hand-authored, accessible SVGs; code blocks are complete and copy-pasteable.

• GIS data stewards who need every dataset to carry a defensible history.
• Python automation engineers wiring provenance into spatial ETL/ELT.
• Compliance officers mapping GDPR, FISMA, INSPIRE, and ISO 19115 obligations to real data fields.
• Government and agency teams who have to produce audit-ready lineage on demand.

The guide is organised into four tracks, each with an overview and a set of step-by-step how-tos:

The vocabulary and the shape of a lineage system — provenance models, transformation logging standards, trust boundaries, data stewardship, scoping rules for agencies, and how to map regulatory frameworks to capture points.

Embedding provenance directly in code — workflow hooks, asynchronous logging, tamper-evident raster hashing, and metadata injection, plus a Prefect-versus-Airflow decision guide for orchestrating lineage capture.

Where lineage lives and how it stays fast — PostGIS schema design, graph databases for derivation chains, write-once-read-many retention on object storage, spatial and temporal index tuning, and a PostGIS-versus-Neo4j comparison for spatial lineage graphs.

Turning lineage records into audit evidence — dedicated playbooks for GDPR on location data, FISMA control families, the INSPIRE metadata mandate, and a full ISO 19115 lineage implementation, each with control-to-field tables and Python validation.

• 50+ in-depth articles spanning fundamentals, automation, storage, and compliance.
• Runnable code in Python 3.10+, SQL/PostGIS, and Cypher — with realistic version pins.
• Standards-grounded: ISO 19115, W3C PROV-O, OGC API — Records, INSPIRE, FISMA/NIST 800-53, GDPR.
• Accessible by design: hand-authored SVG diagrams, WCAG-checked contrast, semantic structure.
• Fast and dependency-light: a static site with no third-party trackers or CDN dependencies.

A static site generated with Eleventy, authored in Markdown, and deployed to Cloudflare Pages. Structured data (Article and BreadcrumbList JSON-LD), the sitemap, navigation, and cross-links are generated from the content tree at build time.

npm install      # install build dependencies
npm run build    # generate the static site into _site/
npm run serve    # local dev server with live reload
npm run deploy    # build and publish to Cloudflare Pages

src/
  content/            Markdown articles, organised by section
  _includes/          Nunjucks layouts and partials
  _data/site.json     Site metadata and section definitions
  assets/             CSS, icons, and client JavaScript
.eleventy.js          Build configuration (Markdown, code highlighting, tables)

Issues and suggestions that improve technical accuracy are welcome. The content is provided as a learning and reference resource; if you build on it, a link back to provenance-tracking.com is appreciated.

provenance-tracking.com — trace every coordinate, raster, and transform.