A Claim describes a property of a subject as observed by or attested to by an issuer. Examples include group or role membership, or age and geographic references. A claim can be evaluated to determine access rights to data and other secured resources during the process of authorization.

Claim.ClaimType is a string (typically a URI) that tells you what the value of the claim means. For example, a claim with a ClaimType of "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/givenname” represents a user’s first name. This claim type was defined by Microsoft for use with CardSpace. A ClaimType of “urn:role” might be your own simple representation of a role. The point is that you don’t have to wait for a standards body to define a claim type that you need – as long as you and your issuer agree on what a particular claim means, you can call it anything you want.

Once you know the type of the claim, you can read its value from Claim.Value. In order to reduce dependencies and simplify administration the value of a claim is represented only as a string. For anything more complicated, it is recommended that you use standard XML schema types to serialize the value into a string. This is where Claim.ValueType comes in; it helps you figure out how to deserialize the value of the claim by telling you the format of the value.

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