InCommon Entity Categories

Terminology

Two international Entity Category Profiles in the R&E space are:

  1. REFEDS Research & Scholarship Entity Category
  2. REFEDS Hide From Discovery Entity Category

Two Entity Category Profiles in the InCommon Federation are:

  1. Registered By InCommon Category
  2. InCommon Research & Scholarship Support Category

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

Service Categories

Browse a list of all entity categories

A Service Category is a special type of Entity Category. A Service Category is a group of service providers with a common purpose. The intended goal of a Service Category is to make attribute release more scalable. To this end, IdPs release a known set of attributes to entire categories of SPs. Using entity attributes (instead of entityIDs), attribute release policy at the IdP is configured for all services in the category (both present and future), rather than once per service. IdPs signal their support of particular service categories in metadata, which allows SPs to build dynamic, relevant discovery interfaces.

To become a member of the Research and Scholarship Category, a service provider supports the research and scholarly activities of the higher ed community and satisfies a modest set of technical requirements.

Resources