One comment, Heiko: I remember now that Globus developers have warned me that handling of QName simple typed attributes and elements in the Apache Axis stack is somewhat challenging. They requested the use of anyURI type instead, which has about the same level of namespace safety as QNames I think. I cannot remember the exact issue, but believe it has to do with the way the QNames are parsed and the order in which the namespace prefixes handled. :-( I think we should restrict our use of QNames to the explicit attribute and element tags we define, and not for use in field values. Particularly for places where we use the "ids" to correlate between fragments of Agreement documents, I think URIs which we treat opaquely are the way to go. I think equality matching for URIs is also well-defined and simple to program. I agree that descriptive fields, not used for correlation in our base protocol or agreement semantics, should just be string types. karl -- Karl Czajkowski karlcz@univa.com