InCommon Metadata Services
InCommon metadata is the basis for trust and interoperability within the InCommon Federation. In a very real sense, SAML metadata powers the Federation. Without metadata, trusted operations would grind to a halt.
Put another way, SAML metadata represents the trust backbone of the InCommon Federation. Within the federation, trust is based on what effectively is a SAML-based Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) built on top of trusted SAML metadata. (This is not to be confused with the more traditional notion of an X.509 certificate-based PKI.)
Trusted metadata makes multilateral federation possible.
Federation participants trust InCommon to vet the metadata content submitted by other participants. In turn, InCommon vouches for the integrity of the metadata it makes available to participants. This implicit trust agreement underlies and strengthens the security of the SAML protocol exchanges used throughout the Federation.
Metadata Format
InCommon metadata conforms to the OASIS SAML V2.0 Metadata specification and is schema-valid against the OASIS SAML V2.0 Metadata schema, which is an XML Schema. A handful of extension schema published by OASIS are supported as well.
InCommon metadata is translated from XML to JSON on a daily basis. The latter are used to render the Federation Info Pages. See the wiki topic on Metadata-Driven Web Pages for more information.