InCommon Metadata Service Wiki
Page tree
Skip to end of metadata
Go to start of metadata

Accessing the production InCommon metadata using MDQ

The production InCommon Metadata Service is available at:

https://mdq.incommon.org

The service supports the MDQ protocol, which enables you to look up individual entity's metadata using its entity ID. To query, connect to the MDQ location with the following query string syntax:

https://mdq.incommon.org/entities/<$entityID>

where <$entityID> is the URL-encoded string of the entity ID you are searching. If you are searching for entity ID: https://acme.org/idp, the web query would be:

https://mdq.incommon.org/entities/https%3A%2F%2Facme.org%2Fidp

Fully federation ready software such as Shibboleth, has built in support for the MDQ protocol. They may have configuration options to help simplify implementation. See:

Retrieving metadata as aggregates

In addition to the querying feature, the Metadata Service produces two aggregates for bulk download. They can be used in place of the legacy InCommon aggregates should you not be able to take advantage of the MDQ protocol. The IdP-only aggregate, in particular, is useful for discovery services to retrieve/list IdPs in the federations in the discovery UI.

Configure your client with an aggregate below just like you would any hosted metadata, or how you had previously configured your client to use the legacy InCommon aggregates.

You will need to configure your clients to use new signing keys issued for the environment you wish to download metadata from. The aggregates available are:

Aggregates for the Production environment

NameURLDescription
All Entitieshttps://mdq.incommon.org/entitiesAll entities. This is akin to the legacy main aggregate available at http://md.incommon.org/InCommon/InCommon-metadata.xml
IdP Onlyhttps://mdq.incommon.org/entities/idps/allIdP-only aggregate. This is akin to the legacy IdP-only aggregate available at http://md.incommon.org/InCommon/InCommon-metadata-idp-only.xml

Validate the signing key

Signing key: Metadata signing key for the production environment.

Related content

Get help

Can't find what you are looking for?

help Ask the community


4 Comments

  1. Nicole Roy

    Albert Wu (internet2.edu) I'm not sure of the proper way to edit this page given you're working on the space using scroll versions. I found a typo. "MDQ query" in the first subtitle should be either "metadata query" or "MDQ", not MDQ query since that's redundant.

    1. Johnny Lasker

      This has been updated. Thanks!

  2. Donald Lohr

    Please double check that the above indicated url https://acme.org/idp was not correctly encoded.  It should be encoded as  https%3A%2F%2Facme.org%2Fidp in lieu of https%2F%2Facme.org%2Fidp

    1. Johnny Lasker

      Thank you for this feedback, it has been updated.