We have an object and a collection of assertions about it. The assertions may be internal, as in a claim of authorship or date and place of publication on the title page of a book, or external, represented in metadata that accompany the object, perhaps pr

We have an object and a collection of assertions about it. The assertions may be internal, as in a claim of authorship or date and place of publication on the title page of a book, or external, represented in metadata that accompany the object, perhaps provided by third parties. We want to ask questions about the integrity of the object: Has the object been changed since its creation, and, if so, has this altered the fundamental essence of the object? (This can include asking these questions about accompanying assertions, either embedded in the
object or embodied in accompanying metadata).