Ponton Hamburg Statement of Interest in Signed XML

Ponton Hamburg organises a R&D project called COSMOS - Common Open Service
Market fOr SMEs. Additionally, we are doing projects in the area of selling
soft-goods across the Internet. Due to the German signature law, it will be
very likely in 1-2 years that digital signatures become a commonplace in
specific business areas- therefore, we are interested in an early
standardisation of handling and interchange of signatures and certificates.

Main subject of the COSMOS project is to use electronic contracts as a main
concept for negotiating, signing and execution commercial transactions across
the Internet.
Since contracts are represented in XML, the same applies to the signatures
attached.

Therefore, our intention is to find
1. an interoperable, standardised representation for signatures as a part of
any electronic document, and specifically for electronic contracts
2. to find an interoperable representation for contracts themselves in order to
leverage the contracting process between business partners.

Expected outputs:
- I would like to establish an agenda for the further steps in standardisation
- I'd like to identify related areas that are mature for standardisation (proxy
signatures, contracts)
- I'd like to know who is working on what and how to cooperate in this
standardisation issue

I'd like to contribute to the workshop with experience from the COSMOS project
and our current, XML-based contract model. During the research time so far, we
implemented a suite of demonstrators that needs to be mapped to standard
technology right now.

Michael Merz, Ponton Hamburg, Germany