I first encountered the term "provenance" in 2007 when I was working on an undergraduate research project at UC Santa Cruz in the area of metadata-based search for the Ceph distributed file system. I particularly remember reading this USENIX ATC 2007 paper: https://www.usenix.org/conference/2007-usenix-annual-technic.... This was my introduction to the concept of provenance.

Professor Margo Seltzer (https://www.seltzer.com/margo/) is a well-known researcher in the area of provenance. I highly recommend reading her papers if you're interested, starting with her USENIX ATC 2006 paper "Provenance-Aware Storage Systems".