An administrative act (a resolution, a permit, a notification) is the unit of work of government. If the term is new to you we published a primer on what an electronic case file is and how one gets implemented.
When we introduced the signed, structured architecture behind SovraGov's GDE2, we explained why governments should move beyond PDFs. This edition looks underneath that architecture: what is actually stored, where it lives, how it is searched and verified, and what makes it perform at government scale.
The act as signed text
In GDE2, an administrative act is stored as signed structured text instead of a PDF. Each act is a lightweight Markdown document containing the content, metadata such as jurisdiction, case number and signers, and a detached digital signature.
The signature is computed over a canonicalized version of the text, ensuring that even the smallest change invalidates the signature while identical content always produces the same result. Officials sign through their digital identity wallet, using the same X.509 certificate infrastructure governments already trust.
The legally binding record is the signed text itself. When a regulation or an external system requires a PDF, GDE2 renders one on demand from the signed source, so the PDF becomes a view and the signed text remains the record itself.
Where it lives
Storing administrative acts as text only matters if the underlying architecture is designed around it.
GDE2 uses PostgreSQL 18 as the durable registry: it holds each act’s metadata, its workflow state and its full traceability, together with the SHA-256 hash that binds the row to its content. The document body itself is persisted in a decoupled object store and referenced from the database by that hash, with the PDF generated on demand from the sealed source rather than stored as a second heavy artifact.
Every operation is executed as a single transaction, ensuring that writing the act, recording the signature, updating the case file and linking related documents either all succeed together or none do. The result is a reliable, searchable registry where both content and metadata can be queried directly.
Search that reads the whole archive
Because administrative acts are stored as text, PostgreSQL can index their full content natively. Officials can search clauses, amounts or related proceedings across years of archives in seconds instead of relying only on titles or metadata.
GDE2 also adds semantic search using embeddings, allowing the system to retrieve documents by meaning rather than exact wording. This powers the drafting assistant, which surfaces relevant precedents and regulations as context while keeping every decision under human review and digital signature.
Verification that outlives the system
Every act in GDE2 carries a standard CAdES digital signature over a SHA-256 hash. Anyone with the record, the signature and the certificate chain can independently verify its integrity and authorship, without connecting to the original system.
When long-term proof of existence is required, the signed act can also be anchored on SovraChain, adding a publicly verifiable timestamp. The result is a record that remains trustworthy and interoperable, even as systems evolve or are replaced.
Independent verifiability matters most in a federal reality where each jurisdiction chooses its own technological path, a landscape we explored in our conversation with Mauro Solano about how 24 jurisdictions built a common digital agenda: a record that any system can verify on its own is a record that interoperates by construction.
Built for government-scale workloads
GDE2 is designed to handle millions of concurrent operations without sacrificing responsiveness. This makes it well suited to government systems, where usage often spikes around filing deadlines instead of growing steadily.
The runtime isolates failures so that if one process encounters an error, the rest of the system continues operating normally. Background tasks such as notifications, PDF generation and external integrations run independently, while the infrastructure is fully versioned and reproducible, making deployments reliable and predictable.
Architecture arguments are easy to make on a whiteboard, so we measured this one on real production case files, running the same operations on both foundations. The result was consistent across every test: ten times the performance, with the same acts, the same signatures and the same legal validity, on a foundation built to hold them.
Continue the conversation
More on digital signatures, verifiable credentials and blockchain anchoring at sovra.io/knowledge.
If you are evaluating the modernization of your document or case-file system, contact us.
If this was useful, forward it to a colleague who has to answer for a records system.
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Worth reading this week
UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Signatures: the legal foundation: validity lives in properties of the signature, never in a file format.
eIDAS Regulation (EU 910/2014): the European framework for electronic identification and trust services.
PostgreSQL Full-Text Search documentation: how a relational engine indexes and ranks document text natively, the capability a text record unlocks.