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Data provenance in commerce data

Why every price should carry its origin and a confidence weight, and what goes wrong when it does not.

A price is a claim, and claims have sources. A value read from a seller's own interface and one inferred from a category listing are not the same fact, and storing them identically destroys information you cannot recover.

Provenance makes three things possible: filtering (act only on values above a confidence threshold), auditing (explain why a decision was made), and honesty (say what you do not know).

No vendor in this category publishes an accuracy rate. Provenance is the mechanism that would let one — which is why it is a differentiator rather than a detail.

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