Subject: RE: My objections to the submitted draft - transitions planned fo r notary draft & no concern about document formats

From: Tobias Gondrom <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2004 17:15:54 +0100

Jeff and Brian, 

I fully agree with Brian and Carl:
We want not to take the document format into account for the Trusted
Archive.
There are many troubles when an archive must interpret the files/formats
sent to it - if it is even legal. (That's one of the reasons why AFAIK all
big commercial archive providers (Filenet, IXOS, Documentum, ...) avoid that
at their servers at all cost.)

With the first 2 Ids (protocol and data structures) we hope to solve the
long-term provability and the non-repudiation of (possibly signed) data -
the transition shall be adressed with the notary services as this is one (of
course only one of many) of their basic functions.

An other argument for keeping transitions now out is to keep the
problem/specification at a manageable size so that we can solve it with the
first clearly planned step and benefit from it. And later add more and
improve.

Best regards

	Tobias

Ps.: Btw. concerning the "transitions" and the notary draft planned for end
of this year I would like to invite you to join everyone in May when we
start the planning and requirements for that.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brian Hunter [mailto:[email-masked]] 
> Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2004 15:36
> To: Jeff Williams
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: My objections to the submitted draft
> 
> 
> 
> Jeff,
> 
> Jeff Williams wrote:
> >>I believe that the goal of LTANS is to archive evidence, possibly 
> >>along with the document, that proves that the document existed at a 
> >>certain time in the past.  This goal was also illustrated 
> by Aleksej 
> >>in his last post.  Although document format and its transition is 
> >>important, I do not believe that is the goal of LTANS.
> > 
> > 
> >   Understood.  Perhaps its transition should be a goal? If 
> not I would 
> > ask, why not?
> 
> You are correct, this is a goal of LTANS, which is covered under the 
> milestone notary services requirements.  However, I think for the 
> current long-term archive requirements document, and its related 
> protocol and data structures, that file format conversion is not an 
> issue.  Thus, I think discussions on file transitions will be 
> valuable 
> when the notary services requirements are written.
> 
> Regards,
> Brian
>

---

From: Larry Masinter <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2004 13:48:54 -0800

> at their servers at all cost.)

The archive might still track the format of the files in it, the
relationship
between the original archived file and some translation of it into a
current format, whether the file format was considered an "archival"
subset, etc. MIME types may not be enough to characterize file formats
for archival formats, and you might need, for example, some standards
for media features to describe archival properties.

> first clearly planned step and benefit from it. And later add more and

I think you can make a case for including standard metadata for file
formats even if the system doesn't require or provide for translation.

Larry