Data Integration and Analysis System (DIAS)
National Institute of Informatics (NII) Group

Gakunin (Academic Access Management Federation in Japan) is a system for authentication federated by providers and users of academic services. It is a system to realize a single sign-on, where users can sign in many service providers using the same ID and password. It not only saves users to remember different IDs and passwords for different service providers, but also saves time to set up a new account for using a new service, and enable a secure authentication following the security policy of academic institutions. Initially it was used for the management of license for subscribing electronic journals of publishers, but later its usage has expanded to many types of academic content.

Technically speaking, Gakunin follows the specification called Shibboleth, so it is interoperable with other federations using the same specification. Gakunin is limited to inside Japan, but we also have other federations outside of Japan, so we can realize single sign-on in a global scale with other federations. This means that if DIAS participates in Gakunin as a service provider (SP), users outside of Japan can also access DIAS using institution's accounts they normally use. We are now preparing for improving accessibility to DIAS using Gakunin.