What is "Publication" of Intervals?

Publication refers to the process of making Intervals and their Cross-certifications available in one or more databases that are:

• Permanently accessible, even if the issuing organization ceases to exist
• Stored in such a way that they cannot be altered without detection

Publication is achieved in the ProofMark system with the following processes:

• An Interval and its Cross-certifications are published to the root archive in the Interval'’s archive Tree, before the Interval can become active
• An archive can be periodically replicated to several servers in order to provide high availability and redundancy against loss

Intervals and their Cross-certifications are propagated from one archive to another, as defined by the subordinate branches of the Intervals archive Tree, using the following automatic process:

• As an Interval is stored in any archive, it is flagged for propagation if there are any branches in the Interval's archive Tree that occur beneath the archive in which the Interval is currently being stored
• Periodically, a ProofMark propagation service forwards all Intervals marked in this way to each of the archives that appear beneath the current archive in the Interval's archive Tree (the propagation flag for the Interval is cleared when the Interval has been propagated successfully to each of these archives)
• This recursive process continues until the Interval has eventually been stored in each archive in its archive Tree Replication is important, even for verification-only servers, since Interval publishing and propagation only distribute Interval information to a single server in each archive group.