Below is a sampling of terms you will be encountering in our discussions and documents. If there are additional terms you would like to see defined, please add them here. If you have suggestions for wording, feel free to edit the page. 

eduGAIN is a service based in the EU that allows participating R&E federations to exchange metadata of IdPs and SPs to ease the cost and increase the interoperability among common partners and collaborations.  European national R&E federations founded eduGAIN through the GÉANT consortium, where its governance continues to reside.

ERG - InCommon Steering's External Relations and Governance subcommittee. Co-chaired by Chris Holmes from Baylor University and Joel Cooper from Swarthmore College, this community subcommittee of InCommon Steering is responsible for oversight of the community, corporate and organizational relationships regarding InCommon's activities. 

FedOP refers to Federation Operators, a generic term that is used by REFEDS-member Federation to refer to the staff that manage the mechanics of running  an identity federation. See Ops.

FOPP is the Federation Operating Policies and Practices document that  describes at a high level how the InCommon support organization is structured and how it operates  to support the entire InCommon Federation.

GEANTs the pan-European research and education network that interconnects Europe’s National Research and Education Networks. GEANT runs eduGAIN metadata sharing service.

Metadata or metadata aggregate in the identity federation context is the information about member organizations that a federation operator assembles and "signs" or vouches for its validity. This information includes service and identity provider connection, trust (signing keys), and contact information, as well as federation-related tags such as Research and Scholarship Category. 

Ops typically refers to Operations, the group of staff that manages the technical and business mechanics of operating an identity federation. See FedOps.

R&E (Research and Education) is a generic acronym that refers to the Higher Education segment of the Education sector. It can also refer to the entire Education sector. 

R&S (Research and Scholarship) refers to a category of service providers in InCommon that have attested to compliance with the InCommon Research and Scholarship Category definition. REFEDS recently released the global-version of the R&S category tag.

REFEDS (Research and Education Federations) is the collection of international identity federation working together to benefit the mutual needs of research and education identity federations worldwide. It aims to represent the requirements of research and education in the ever-growing space of access and identity management, working with and influencing the direction of appropriate organizations on behalf of their participants. This group develops standards and polices (like the REFEDS Research and Scholarship Category Tag) to aid in global interoperability among R&E Federations. 

TAC - InCommon Technical Advisory Committee. Chaired by Steven Carmody from Brown University, this community group is advisory to the InCommon Steering Committee and is responsible for lead the technical innovation of InCommon Federation primarily. The group also oversees the InCommon Certificate Service.