XFN defines policies for naming objects in the federated namespace. The goals of these policies are
To allow easy and uniform composition of names
To promote coherence in naming across applications and services
To provide a simple, yet sufficiently rich, set of policies so that applications need not invent and implement ad hoc policies for specific environments
To enhance an application's portability
To promote cross-platform interoperability in heterogeneous computing environments
FNS policies contain all the XFN policies plus extensions for the Solaris environment.
Computing environments now offer worldwide scope and a large range of services. Users expect to have access to services at every level of the computing environment. FNS policies provide a common framework for the three levels of services: global, enterprise, and application.
FNS provides to applications a set of policies on how name services are arranged and used:
Policies that specify how to federate the enterprise namespace so that it is accessible in the global namespace.
Policies that specify the names and bindings present in the initial context of every process.
Name service policies for enterprise objects: organizations, hosts, users, sites, files, and services.
Policies that define the relationships among the organization, host, user, site, files, and service enterprise objects.
Policies that specify the syntax of names used to refer to those enterprise objects.
The FNS policies do not specify:
The actual names used within name services.
Naming within applications. Application-level naming is left to individual applications or groups of related applications.
The attributes to use once the object has been named.