Also known as Certifications in Trusted Relationships for Access Management: The InCommon Model, these metadata elements are formal assertions of specific information about the entity, generally related to how it should be treated by other entities. This includes, for example:

• That a Service Provider has been certified by its federation as meeting the requirements of the Research and Scholarship (R&S) Category, so it is qualified to receive certain identity attributes from Identity Providers that support R&S.
• That an Identity Provider would like to be excluded from discovery interfaces.
• That an Identity Provider is authorized to issue scoped attributes and identifiers from a certain Scope.

Qualifications and Capabilities may require review by a third party (typically, the entity's federation), or they may be self-declared, depending on their definition and governing policy. The Entity Attributes supported by InCommon are listed in Entity categories, and the Scope attribute is discussed in Scope.

For more information, see:

• saml-mdattr-entityattributes
• saml-shibmd-scope