What is a DACS federation? What are jurisdictions?
A DACS federation consists of one or more jurisdictions, each of which authenticates its users, provides web services, or both. Jurisdictions coordinate information sharing through light-weight business practices implemented as a requirement of membership in a DACS federation. Each jurisdiction is assigned a unique name within a federation, by convention a capitalized, short abbreviation (e.g., EARTH or VULCAN). Each authenticated user is identified by a DACS username consisting of the name of the authenticating jurisdiction and a username within that jurisdiction (e.g., EARTH:kirk or VULCAN:spock). An authenticated user assumes a federation-wide DACS identity; any jurisdiction can understand credentials produced by any other jurisdiction within the same federation. Therefore, a user only needs to be authenticated once to access web services at any jurisdiction using that identity. This is known as single sign-on.
