Provenance of data can be recorded, viewed

[pmackay]

This is a feature suggestion (coming from folklabs/connecting-communities#23) for the ability to record where records in a data import have come from. It relates to #324.

I would really appreciate any thoughts on:

• Does this sound useful?
• Has it come up before?
• What might be a logical approach to implementing? A new Metadata table to implement the metadata schema in OR? Perhaps there could also be a Source table that might store some of the key fields in a datapackage.json file (if provided).

[greggish]

This has certainly come up in other Ohana deployments, would be very useful. cc @Graysonwright @volkanunsal @devinbalkind

[monfresh]

If this something that will be useful to most deployments, feel free to discuss the implementation details with others who might have built it or are planning to, and then submit a pull request.

In order for me to provide thoughts about the approach, I would need to better understand the purpose and value of this feature. As you know, I love to ask questions, so here they are:

• Why is it important to know the source of the data? What does this information allow you to do?
• Is it necessary to know the source of the data at any given time, or is it only useful at the beginning, when consolidating data from various sources?
• If a single deployment will consist of data from multiple sources, once the data is imported, is it necessary to continue keeping track of where the data came from? If so, why?
• Does the source of the data need to be visible in the admin interface for every single entity (organization, location, service, program, etc.)?