Provenance as accountability: Transparent and verifiable cataloguing for the digital age

This chapter proposes a strategic shift in provenance practice, moving from traditional pedigree models toward a digital framework of institutional accountability. While historical ownership records were often shaped by commercial interests and selective omissions, modern ethical mandates—driven by the 1998 Washington Principles and efforts toward repatriation and historical reconciliation—demand a scientific approach to transparency and verifiability. The chapter argues that current museum cataloguing remains limited by analogue concepts and unstructured free text data, which hinders the collective ability to identify looted, stolen, or unethically appropriated cultural property. To realize provenance as a collective tool of accountability, the text advocates for a decentralized system based on Linked Open Data (LOD) that integrates FAIR and CARE data principles. This framework utilizes VISU—a conceptual categorization of information that is vague, incomplete, subjective, or uncertain—to ensure that gaps and expert hypotheses are made explicit rather than hidden. By adopting a three-layered nanopublication structure, stable identifiers, and shared vocabularies, the cultural heritage community can transform provenance into a machine-readable, verifiable, and universally shareable resource.