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Notary Project website screenshot

Notary Project

The Notary Project is a CNCF incubating set of specifications and tools for signing and verifying container images and other OCI artifacts. It provides Notation, a CLI and library for signing artifacts stored in OCI-compliant registries. The project defines standards for signature formats, trust policies, and verification workflows to secure software supply chains.

human only

Real signal across most facets with visible, nameable gaps — the contract exists but is thin, or the portal is good while governance and commercial terms are absent.

Kin Score

API Evangelist profiles Notary Project the way a machine reads it — 14 machine-readable artifacts across 4 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.

Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — Notary Project scores 46.6/100 (developing), with a separate agent-readiness read of 7/100 (human only). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.

Kin Score

This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
Composite quality — 46.6/100 · developing
Contract Quality 9.9 / 25
Developer Ergonomics 4.3 / 20
Commercial Clarity 7.9 / 20
Operational Transparency 6.8 / 13
Governance 8.8 / 12
Discoverability 8.8 / 10
Agent readiness — 7/100 · human only
Machine-Readable Contract 0 / 18
Agentic Access Contract 0 / 15
MCP Server 0 / 12
Machine-Readable Auth 0 / 10
Idempotency 0 / 9
Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8
Request/Response Examples 0 / 7
Rate-Limit Signaling 7 / 7
Typed Event Surface 0 / 6
Agent Skills 0 / 5
Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4
Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

How we profile Notary Project

Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Notary Project. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.

APIs 4

Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

Notary Project Signing Specification

The Notary Project specification defines the signature envelope format, trust store and trust policy for container image signing and verification. It supports multiple signature...

Notation CLI

Notation is the command-line tool that implements the Notary Project specifications for signing and verifying OCI artifacts stored in container registries. It supports signing w...

notation-go Library

notation-go is the official Go library for signing and verifying OCI artifacts using the Notary Project specifications. It provides the programmatic interface used by the Notati...

Notation Plugin Extensibility

The Notation plugin extensibility specification defines the interface that third-party plugins must implement to integrate with Notation for key management, signing, and verific...

Pricing Plans 1

Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

Notary Plans Pricing

3 plans

PLANS

Rate Limits 1

Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

Notary Rate Limits

5 limits

RATE LIMITS

FinOps 1

Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.

Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.

Semantic Vocabularies 1

JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.

JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.

Notary Context

7 classes · 32 properties

JSON-LD

Spectral Rules 1

Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.

Notary Project API Rules

6 rules · 4 warnings

SPECTRAL

JSON Schema 4

Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.

Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.

Notary Project Plugin Protocol

0 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Notation Plugin Protocol

0 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Notary Project JWS Signature Envelope

4 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Notary Project Trust Policy

2 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Security Posture 1

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Notary Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · HSTS

SECURITY

Resources

Every other property we hold for Notary Project — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.

Get Started 1

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

Design & Contract 1

Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events

Build 2

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

Access & Security 1

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

Operate 2

Status, limits, changes, and where to get help

Company 2

The organization behind the API

← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/notary · machine-readable index on apis.io