Question about entityID

[Cantor, Scott]

> In the meantime, is there any reason I couldn't make my entityID
> dmp2-development, or dmp2-development-CDL, or
> kens-terrific-shibboleth-enabled-application? The entityID is simply a
> unique identifier that is used as a primary key to retrieve my SP's
> metadata from an IDP. It has no other purpose, and could even be an
> opaque unique identifier with no semantic value whatsoever, like
> 4356.5341.3566.5657, right?

It's an absolute URI, and URIs are either URNs or URLs. A URN has a natural naming authority mechanism based on its scheme.
 
Using URLs to name something globally, like Java package naming, relies on DNS to allocate naming authority.

That's entirely a social contract, it has nothing specifically to do with SAML, any more than Java VMs care who wrote software in the net.shibboleth package.

XML namespaces have essentially the same requirements.

-- Scott