Traceability

Traceability is one of the most important aspects of the universal technology of accountability. Accounting is a designed system. Accounting has built in transparency and traceability mechanisms. That traceability is reversable meaning it works in both directions. In addition, accounting has built in quality control mechanisms such as double entry and articulation. This article on traceability explains the notions of "trace", "track", "walk", "drilldown", "provenance", "audit trail".

  • Trace: Trace relates to following a complete path backwards from its current point to where it began.
  • Track: Track relates to following an emerging path forward from a starting point to follow where it goes.
  • Walk: The notion of "walk" is a step-by-step manual navigation through a system from a source to an origin or from an origin to it's source.
  • Drilldown: Drilldown vertical movement through an aggregation; you start at a high-level aggregation or summary like "total revenues" and "click" to see the underlying details of that high-level starting point.
  • Drill across: Drill across is the horizontal counterpart to drilldown. While drilldown takes you deeper into the details of a specific category, drill across enables you to jump from one information set to some other related information set at the same level of granularity. For example, drill across might allow you to switch between a sales database and an inventory database using a "product id".
  • Provenance: Provenance is the chronology of something from its origin to it's current location.
  • Audit trail: An audit trail provides a comprehensive record of the path or a log showing who did what when which provides transparency and accountability information. An audit trail relates to accountability and is a chronological record that provides documentary evidence of the sequence of activities that have affected at any time a specific operation, procedure, or event.

Instead of manually defined connectors such as a cell location in a spreadsheet; the semantics of the dependencies within accounting information can be unambiguously derived from context.

This document, Track-Trace-Walk, and this video by the same name helps you see how tracing, tracking, walking, and drilldown can be implemented within software when information is linked together effectively.  (i.e. if information is not linked together, then it is impossible to effectively move around within that information automatically and so any movement needs to be performed manually)

Epistemic traceability is a trail of thought and reasoning; the ability to track exactly where a piece of information came from and why some system decided that information was true. Epistemic traceability is the audit trail or "chain of reasoning" that shows the journey information has taken from a raw observation to a final conclusion.

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