RE: Notary services requirements -- directions?

[Peter Sylvester <Peter.Sylvester@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> > > Is there an additional need to define means for 
> > representing notarial 
> > > acts performed by humans?
> > > 
> > No. The best is to have the equivalent of a framework paper 
> > that has a free form text place where the nature of the 
> > notarial act and anything else can be noted.
> > 
> > These elements are not subject to automatic treatment by our 
> > core protocol
> > 
> > it may be useful to more than  "free' text, i.e. some schema 
> > or oid based document piece like for soap content or CMS 
> > content types, in order to allow plugin logic do additional 
> > work for semantic validation in a correct way. 
> 
> Seems like part of you says "No" and another part says "Yes":-)  A schema,
> or some such, might be a useful parallel to the signature formats, bindings
> and certification protocol.

It seems to me that your question has two aspects:

- The content to be notarized
- The notarization (envelope)

I am just saying that we probably would not go further down
that having a common envelope for some 'ANY DEFINED BY' 
(to use some obsolete terminology), a 'signature format'
if one prefers this term. 

it looks like we have a similarity with the problem of
archive transformation and metadata, i.e., the extent to
which an archiver has knowledge about the relationship
of 'outer' metadata and some 'inner' structure of the
data.