GLOSSARY

A traceable record of where data originated, how it moved and changed, and where it is used across systems and processes.

Lineage supports impact analysis, root-cause investigation, auditability, migration, privacy requests, and confidence in reports and AI systems.

Before changing a CRM field, a team uses column-level lineage to identify affected warehouse models, dashboards, automation, and machine-learning features.

Lineage can be incomplete or stale, especially across manual exports and opaque vendor systems. It shows movement and transformation but does not by itself prove quality, lawful use, or semantic correctness.

Lineage connects sources, pipelines, transformations, schemas, datasets, reports, models, and destinations. It may be captured from code, query logs, orchestration metadata, or manual documentation and represented at system, table, column, or record level.