Service Providers that are registered with the InCommon Federation can apply for acceptance into entity categories. One of the mostly widely deployed categories is Research & Scholarship, or R&S. One of the goals of this category is to streamline the attribute release process from IdPs to R&S Service Providers by automatically releasing a basic set of attributes.
The UW IdP supports the R&S entity category and will automatically release the following attributes to InCommon-registered Service Providers with the "R&S" category designation. No request for attribute release is required.
This set of attributes is known as the Essential Attribute Bundle.
In February of 2016, the InCommon Federation became a full participant in eduGAIN, an international federation of federations. InCommon is encouraging all IdPs that previously supported "InCommon R&S" to update their configuration to use the eduGAIN "Global R&S" category instead. "Global R&S" uses the same Essential Attribute Bundle as "InCommon R&S." Once the UW IdP is migrated to "Global R&S" the IdP will automatically release these attributes to any R&S SP registered with any federation that participates in eduGAIN.