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InCommon Entity Categories

Two standardized entity category profiles in the international R&E space areThe following entity categories are available within InCommon:

  1. REFEDS Research & Scholarship Entity Categoryhttp://refeds.org/category/research-and-scholarship - Used to streamline researchers' access to federated services that support their work.
  2. REFEDS Hide From Discovery Entity Category
    • http://refeds.org/category/hide-from-discovery

Two additional entity categories used in the InCommon Federation are:

  1.  - Used to exclude an IdP from general-purpose discovery interfaces, e.g., because this is a test IdP.
  2. Registered By InCommon Category - Indicates that the entity was registered by InCommon, as opposed to some other federation. For use within InCommon only.Registered By InCommon Categoryhttp://id.incommon.org/category/registered-by-incommon
  3. InCommon Research & Scholarship Support Category
    • http://id.incommon.org/category/research-and-scholarship

See the child pages to this wiki page for local documentation on each of these entity categories.

Basic Terminology

  • An entity category is a group of entities (SPs or IdPs or both) having a particular characteristic.
  • Membership in an entity category is indicated by an entity attribute in metadata.
  • An entity attribute is a SAML Attribute in a container of type mdattr:EntityAttributeType defined by the SAML V2.0 Metadata Extension for Entity Attributes, an Entity Attribute Profile of SAML Metadata.
  • An Entity Attribute Profile of SAML Metadata describes how SAML Attributes and Assertions may be added to SAML metadata extensions.
  • An Entity Category Profile of SAML Entity Attributes describes a specific entity attribute for categorizing entities according to some Entity Attribute Profile of SAML Metadata.

Types of Entity Categories

Both of the following are special types of entity categories:

  • A service category is a group of service providers with a common purpose. For example, the Research & Scholarship Category is a service category whose goal is to make attribute release more scalable.
  • A support category is a group of entities that support a particular entity category in some fashion. If that entity category is itself a service category, the corresponding support category is a group of IdPs that support the service category in some manner. A given entity category may have multiple support categories. For example, there are two Research & Scholarship Support Categories used in the InCommon Federation.

Resources

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  1. - Deprecated. See Research and Scholarship Category for more information.

For more information about entity categories, see General Information about Entity Categories.

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