Re: RDF and XML digital signatures (was: RDF Primer Comments)

On Saturday 27 April 2002 05:20, Graham Klyne wrote:
> >Is there someone working on an RDF Schema for W3C XML Signatures? It
> > would be great to have an RDF ontology for signatures, so that would
> > could specify signatures within an RDF description instance.
>
> Sorry, no answers for you, but this sounds like the sort of think that
> Joseph Reagle might be thinking about...

I've thought that this indeed would be a great thing to have. I'm afraid 
that's about all I've done so far! <smile/> (There's been previous emails 
approaching the topic [1])

[1]http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-ietf-xmldsig/2001JulSep/0013.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2001Mar/0076.html

> Regarding (a), I take the view that a signature applies to a string of
> bits or bytes, and regard attempts to sign the abstract content as
> unnecessarily problematic.  So S/MIME, PGP/MIME or XMLDSIG all work just
> fine by my reckoning.

Right, this is a tricky question that's bothered me for a while. (How does 
one identify a serialized RDF statement within a file? The hashing I'm 
seeing on cwm is at the file level.)

> I think (b) is an interesting project, if nobody's done anything about it
> already.  I would suggest a goal would be that an RDF graph can describe
> the bare assurance conveyed by a given digital signature on some content
> (a document that encoded information <foo> was signed by identity <bar>
> using a signature method <fie> and a key with certificate attributes
> <foe> certifies by authority <fum> ... etc.)

I'd be happy to work with a RDF guru towards this end.