Points for the April 30 deadline

[John Messing <jmessing@law-on-line.com>]

At the last TC Meeting, a deadline of April 30 was set for suggested
changes to the deliverable that Arshad has been working on. While it was
clarified that such matters can always be raised in connection with
needed changes to the work as it progresses, presumptively consideration
of such matters could be afterwards discouraged or considered out of
order if not raised before the April 30 deadline.

Some areas that were discussed in this context include:

1. Whether authentication of the notary was in or out of scope. My
feeling is that while it is important for notary signing applications to
authenticate notaries and to do so according to one or more standardized
ways, this feature should nonetheless be declared out of scope for this
version of the standard, which focuses principally on interoperability
of disparate cryptographic signing methods, but I welcome other views.

2. Whether some of the processes of notarization should be captured as
meta-data in the standard. For example, a common law notary identifies
the signer and determines whether the act of signing appears to be
voluntary; i.e., the signer is not drunk or insane and does not appear
to be under duress. Should a determination of voluntariness be implied
from the act of notarization itself or optionally, expressly be able to
be captured in XML meta-data for the benefit of other applications?
Harry suggested the former. Unless there is a proponent of another view,
I think his position will carry as persuasive.

3. I have attached an image from a page of the slide show document that
Arshad provided to the group in explaining the work he has done. It
shows elements he has crafted with regard to a signed document element,
which is an integral part of the work he has done. My thought was that
the elements he has defined could include a richer XML vocabulary, which
is a refinement of his work, so that applications could use the standard
xml vocabulary in connection with electronic journal features they
probably will or do also provide to notary users.

4. I would have the signer name broken down into first, last and middle
name elements, on the theory that it is easier for computer applications
to combine pieces of smaller units of text than to take a larger block
of text and try to break it into component pieces (concatenate strings
rather than split them).  

5. Similarly, I would break the address into street address, postal
code, city, state or province, and country.

6. WRT signer ID, I assume this means the hard copy identification
document or documents that the notary relied upon to establish identity.
I would have a list here, perhaps with child elements to establish the
number and issuing jurisdiction, include as options: driver's license,
national passport, state ID card, immigration document, etc.

7. As for signer digital certificate, I propose substituting digital
credential, with child elements that could include digital certificate,
user token, etc.

8. Other elements: in some states a notary actually records a
fingerprint in a journal. Some existing applications also capture a
biometric signature. I suggest an optional element of a  biometric
identifier, which could include iris scan, fingerprint, handwriting
exemplar, etc. This could perhaps be combined with the element list in
no. 7 as other companion elements in the digital credential category.

9. I encourage input from others to these and any other points so that
the TC can decide them at the next meeting and enable Arshad to move
expeditiously forward, and I particularly name as possible contributors
John Jones, Marc Aronson and any NNA representative to the TC.

Best regards.

signeddocument.jpg