The PAESE (Provenance Research in Collections from Colonial Contexts in Lower Saxony) database aggregates object records from museum and university collections in Lower Germany. As the project transitions to a Linked Open Data architecture in PAESE 3.0, it faces a foundational question with both technical and ethical stakes: what would it mean to reorganize provenance data not around objects as stable, bounded entities, but around the historically situated acts—collection, transfer, sale, looting, donation—through which objects moved across time and space, and through which colonial power was exercised and documented?

This paper argues that the shift to an event-oriented structure is not a neutral technical upgrade but a reorientation of what provenance claims to represent, and that the engineering choices involved encode interpretive commitments that existing ontologies do not adequately address. We develop this argument across conceptual and technical registers and ground it in findings from the PAESE 3.0 international survey of community representatives, activists, researchers, and museum professionals from formerly colonized regions.