2. Portals and their development options

A portal is essentially an integration of services and content in a web site. A portal is the next evolutionary step in the use of web browsers. In 1994, it was Mosaic,  then came Netscape, now every computer has some web browser. A browser according to the Special Libraries Association (2000) is a “software that displays web pages and helps facilitate a user interacting with the information on the web pages.” But with the tremendous growth on the number of web pages available, a web browser is not enough. We need a tool to work at a higher level of abstraction, where the user is not required to specify too many details to find the information that she needs or where given the profile of the user, the system can “guess” the user needs or can even correct a typo on the user´s specification. Just like this word processor does when the transcriber misspells much as mcuh. In synthesis, the users need more functionality and intelligence in their browsers.

Even though there is consensus on the general definition of a portal, the major confusion begins when defining specific kinds of portals or when trying to build a taxonomy of portals. In addition, authors have been very creative in the introduction of new terms for every particular type of portal.

We want to focus on Enterprise Portals, also known as enterprise information portals (EIP), intranet portals, corporate portals, and cortals. According to the Special Libraries Association (2000) enterprise portals “represent current evolution of corporate intranet and function as a starting point for employees; EIPs tie together multiple, heterogeneous internal repositories and applications as well as external content sources and services into a single browser-based view that is individualized to a particular user’s task or role; can deliver more relevant content in context than a broad (internet) portal.” Roberts-Witt wrote in 1999: “The idea of a corporate portal is less than a year old and already companies are feeling a sense of urgency in getting them going.”

The Delphi Group conducted a survey in February 1999 of 300 corporate managers to find out  what they thought a portal could do for their companies. Robert-Witt analyzes the top three responses to this survey; we reproduce excerpts from this analysis below. According to the survey, the top 3 responses were:

1. “Sharing information and work methods, which seems to speak directly to the knowledge management notion of making tacit knowledge explicit.”

2. “Business process support, or workflow, indicating that companies see a huge upside to exchanging electronic files rather than moving hard copy from desk to desk in the business process.”

3. “Customer service, mirroring the growing business interest in managing customer relationships.”

Roberts-Witt (1999) also clusters corporate portals into three general classes. These classes are: data, information and collaborative portals. We use this classification because it is adequate for our approach. Below are the definitions of her portal types:

There is a wide range of options for a portal. Beginning with the simplest form of a portal, defined by McCallum et.al.(2000) as “an information gateway that often includes a search engine plus additional organization and content”, to more sophisticated forms of portals. Sophisticated examples include Yahoo and Altavista, (examples of horizontal portals) or high level university campus portals such as described in Eisler (2000) as examples of a vertical portals. The services provided in a portal vary widely with the purpose of it. But some services that are frequently found are: member registration, personalization, search engine, email and discussion boards, organization and indexing of content, from internal and/or external sources. Normally, the users of a portal have to register in it and provide a name and password each time they use it. This allows the system to personalize the services and contents to the specific user. The portal constitutes a single point of entry and a single logon to the services provided. For a thorough coverage of the subject of personalization see the special issue of the Communications of the ACM (Riecken, 2000).

The task of developing a portal is a large and complex one. There are several alternatives for building a portal. We list some of these alternatives here.

Some major issues which the builder of a portal needs to be aware of are: permanent availability, up to date content of the portal, intellectual property of the content of the portal (Thurow, 1999), security, privacy, different user levels with access to different functionality, and how to apply the security and privacy constraints at each level.

A portal could be designed from scratch to provide services and data that are specifically constructed for it. Or it can be conceived as a platform for integrating existing systems and data sources. In the latter case, some major issues in the portal construction complicate the task considerably. These issues are heterogeneity and interoperability, or more generally, system integration. But on the other hand, the effort of building a portal is a facilitator of system integration. For a recent review on system integration in some major applications, see Hasselbring (2000).

How can a portal and a database work together? The first use of a database within a portal is to maintain the user profiles and to support the registration and authentication services. But portals and databases can interact beyond this simple use.  A database can be used as the main “content provider” for the portal. Furthermore, other techniques that add value to the data can be jointly used with the database to provide additional services. Some examples of these other techniques are: data mining, text mining, and information extraction. The database technology is at the core of maintaining the content of a portal correct and up to date. Also, the portal provides a convenient interface to the database. It constitutes the modern way of building a database application; a web-based application that can be integrated to other services and data sources.