  Initially developed and considered for providing authentication and integrity
functions, digital signatures are studied nowadays in relation to electronic
documents (edocs) so that they can be considered equivalent to handwritten
signatures applied on paper documents. Nevertheless, a standardized format to
be used specifically for e-doc representation was not yet specified. Each
document management system is free to choose whatever e-doc format is suitable
for its requirements (e.g. ASCII, Word, PDF, binary). So far, some solutions
for document management systems were found but none of them was designed to
consider security an important requirement and to enable digital signing and
easy management of e-docs. A possible solution to this problem is our secure
document management system named AIDA. This paper focuses on the use of XML and
XML Signature for the representation of e-docs in AIDA.
