Entity Categories group federation entities that share common criteria. Entities (Identity Providers and Service Providers) can declare in their metadata to which Entity Categories they belong. This must be reviewed and approved by the federation the entity belongs to.

The goal of Entity Categories is to allow Identity Providers to release their attributes more easily to a group of Service Providers, instead of each individual Service Provider. In the latter case, the Identity Provider has to review each Service Provider separately, which costs a lot of time. With Entity Categories, the Identity Provider automatically releases attributes to the entire group at once.

Currently, the following Entity Categories are used within eduGAIN:

Research and scholarship

Candidates for the Research and Scholarship (R&S) Category are Service Providers that are operated for the purpose of supporting research and scholarship interaction, collaboration or management, at least in part.

Example Service Providers may include (but are not limited to) collaborative tools and services such as wikis, blogs, project and grant management tools that require some personal information about users to work effectively. This Entity Category should not be used for access to licensed content such as e-journals.

As a Service Provider, you must select a subset of the following attributes for this entity categories:

• personal identifiers: email address, person name (i.e. displayName or a combination of givenName AND sn), eduPersonPrincipalName.
• pseudonymous identifier: eduPersonTargetedID.
• affiliation: eduPersonScopedAffiliation.

Code of Conduct

As a Service Provider, if you want to declare you have signed the Code of Conduct, you should support the Code of Conduct Entity Category.

Hide from Discovery

...

How to support Entity Categories

...