Web portal
Encyclopedia
A web portal or links page is a web site that functions as a point of access to information in the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way.

Apart from the standard search engine
Search engine
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...

 feature, web portals offer other services such as e-mail
E-mail
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

, news, stock prices, information, databases and entertainment. Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel
Look and feel
In software design, look and feel is a term used in respect of a graphical user interface and comprises aspects of its design, including elements such as colors, shapes, layout, and typefaces , as well as the behavior of dynamic elements such as buttons, boxes, and menus...

 with access control and procedures for multiple applications and databases, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether.

Examples of public web portals are AOL
AOL
AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...

, Excite
Excite
Excite is a collection of Internet sites and services owned by IAC Search & Media, which is a subsidiary of InterActive Corporation . Launched in 1994, it is an online service offering a variety of content, including an Internet portal, a search engine, a web-based email, instant messaging, stock...

, iGoogle
IGoogle
iGoogle , a service of Google, is a customizable Ajax-based startpage or personal web portal . Google originally launched the service in May 2005...

, MSN
MSN
MSN is a collection of Internet sites and services provided by Microsoft. The Microsoft Network debuted as an online service and Internet service provider on August 24, 1995, to coincide with the release of the Windows 95 operating system.The range of services offered by MSN has changed since its...

, Netvibes
Netvibes
Netvibes is a personalized dashboard publishing platform for the Web including digital life management, widget distribution services and brand observation rooms.-History:The company was founded by Tariq Krim and Florent Frémont in 2005.-Technology:...

, and Yahoo!
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...

.

History

In the late 1990s the web portal was a hot commodity. After the proliferation of web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

s in the late-1990s many companies tried to build or acquire a portal to have a piece of the Internet market. The web portal gained special attention because it was, for many users, the starting point of their web browser. Netscape
Netscape
Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...

 became a part of America Online, the Walt Disney Company launched Go.com
Go.com
Go.com is a web portal first launched by Jeff Gold, and now operated by the Walt Disney Internet Group, which is a part of The Walt Disney Company. The portal includes content from ABC News, ESPN, and FamilyFun.com, all of which are associated with Disney and are hosted under a .go.com name...

, IBM and others launched Prodigy, and Excite
Excite
Excite is a collection of Internet sites and services owned by IAC Search & Media, which is a subsidiary of InterActive Corporation . Launched in 1994, it is an online service offering a variety of content, including an Internet portal, a search engine, a web-based email, instant messaging, stock...

 and @Home
@Home Network
@Home Network was a high-speed cable Internet service provider from 1996 to 2002. It was founded by Milo Medin, cable companies TCI, Comcast, and Cox Communications, and William Randolph Hearst III, who was their first CEO, as a joint venture to produce high-speed cable Internet service through...

 became a part of AT&T
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...

 during the late 1990s. Lycos
Lycos
Lycos, Inc. is a search engine and web portal established in 1994. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, webhosting, social networking, and entertainment websites.-Corporate history:...

 was said to be a good target for other media companies such, as CBS
CBS
CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a major US commercial broadcasting television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of...

.

The portal craze, with old media companies racing to outbid each other for Internet properties, died down with the dot-com bust
Dot-com bubble
The dot-com bubble was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2000 during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the more...

 in 2000 and 2001. Disney pulled the plug on Go.com
Go.com
Go.com is a web portal first launched by Jeff Gold, and now operated by the Walt Disney Internet Group, which is a part of The Walt Disney Company. The portal includes content from ABC News, ESPN, and FamilyFun.com, all of which are associated with Disney and are hosted under a .go.com name...

, Excite went bankrupt, and its remains were sold to iWon.com. Some portal sites such as Yahoo! and those others first listed in this article remain active
Active
Active may refer to:Human Activity* An active lifestyle, a lifestyle characterized by frequent or various social, intellectual, and physical activities* An "active" in a fraternity or sororityComputers and electronics...

.

Horizontal vs. vertical portal (Vortals)

Two broad categorizations of portals are horizontal portals, which cover many areas, and vertical portals, which are focused on one functional area.
Another definition for a horizontal portal is, that it is used as a platform to several companies in the same economic sector or to the same type of manufacturers or distributors.
A vertical portal consequently is a specialized entry point to a specific market or industry niche, subject area, or interest, also called vortal.

Vertical information portal

A vertical information portal (VIP) is a specialized entry point to a specific marketplace and or industry niche. VIP's provide news, editorial content, digital publications, and e-commerce capabilities. Separate from traditional vertical portals, VIP's provide dynamic multimedia applications including social networking, video posting, and blogging.

Personal portals

A personal portal is a site on the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

 that typically provides personalized capabilities to its visitors, providing a pathway to other content. It is designed to use distributed application
Distributed application
-Introduction:Where classic software systems of the past century were mostly based on Client–server models and Client-centric application development, both ultimately run on one single computer, be it the client computer or the server....

s, different numbers and types of middleware
Middleware
Middleware is computer software that connects software components or people and their applications. The software consists of a set of services that allows multiple processes running on one or more machines to interact...

 and hardware to provide services from a number of different sources. In addition, business portals are designed for sharing and collaboration in workplaces. A further business-driven requirement of portals is that the content be able to work on multiple platforms such as personal computer
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...

s, personal digital assistant
Personal digital assistant
A personal digital assistant , also known as a palmtop computer, or personal data assistant, is a mobile device that functions as a personal information manager. Current PDAs often have the ability to connect to the Internet...

s (PDAs), and cell phones/mobile phone
Mobile phone
A mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...

s.
Information, news, and updates are examples of content that would be delivered through such a portal. Personal portals can be related to any specific topic such as providing friend information on a social network or providing links to outside content that may help others beyond your reach of services. Portals are not limited to simply providing links. Information or content that is placed on the web may create a portal in the sense of a path to new knowledge and capabilities.

News portals

The traditional media rooms all around the world are fast adapting to the new age technologies. This marks the beginning of news portals by media houses across the globe. This new media channels give them the opportunity to reach the viewers in a shorter span of time than their print media counter parts.

Government web portals

At the end of the dot-com boom in the 1990s, many governments had already committed to creating portal sites for their citizens. These included primary portals to the Governments as well as portals developed for specific audiences. Examples of Government web portals include;
  • australia.gov.au
    Australia.gov.au
    Australia.gov.au provides a single entry point to government in Australia, linking to information and services from around 900 Australian Government websites, as well as selected State and Territory government resources. In addition, the site indexes over 4 million pages from Australian, State and...

     for Australia
    Australia
    Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

    .
  • newzealand.govt.nz for New Zealand
    New Zealand
    New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...

    .
  • USA.gov
    USA.gov
    USA.gov is the official web portal of the United States government. It is designed to improve the public’s interaction with the U.S. government by quickly directing website visitors to the services or information they are seeking, and by inviting the public to share ideas to improve government...

     for the United States (in English) & GobiernoUSA.gov
    GobiernoUSA.gov
    ' is the official web portal of the United States Government in Spanish. It is the sister site of USA.gov, the official web portal of the U.S. Government in English. "Gobierno" is Spanish for "government."...

     (in Spanish).
  • Disability.gov for citizens with disabilities in the United States.
  • Directgov
    Directgov
    Directgov is the UK government's digital service for people in the United Kingdom, providing a single point of access to public sector information and services.The content is developed by government departments, working with a central Directgov team...

     for citizens & businesslink.gov.uk for businesses in the United Kingdom.
  • india.gov.in
    India.gov.in
    India.gov.in is the Indian Government’s Web portal for Indian citizens. It presents a wide range of information resources and online services from various government sources, accessible from a single point...

     for India.
  • Europa (web portal)
    Europa (web portal)
    Europa is the official web portal of the European Union . It is intended to improve the public’s interaction with EU institutions by quickly directing website visitors to the services or information they are seeking. Europa links to all EU agencies and institutions in addition to press releases...

     links to all EU agencies and institutions in addition to press releases and audiovisual content from press conferences.
  • Health-EU portal
    Health-EU portal
    Health-EU Portal is an official web portal of the Health and Consumers Directorate-General that facilities the access of public-related health information to European Union citizens....

     gathers all relevant health topics from across Europe.
  • National Resource Directory
    National Resource Directory
    *The National Resource Directory is a United States Government inter-agency web portal for Wounded Warriors, Service Members, Veterans, their families and caregivers. It provides information and links to thousand of national, state and local resources...

     links to resources for United States Service Members, Veterans and their families (NRD.gov).

Cultural Portals

Cultural portals aggregate digitised cultural collections of galleries, libraries, archives and museums. This type of portals provides a point of access to invisible web
Deep web
The Deep Web refers to World Wide Web content that is not part of the Surface Web, which is indexed by standard search engines....

 cultural content that may not be indexed by standard search engines. Digitised collections can include books, artworks, photography, journals, newspapers, music, sound recordings, film, maps, diaries and letters, and archived websites as well as the descriptive metadata associated with each type of cultural work. These portals are usually based around a specific national or regional groupings of institutions. Examples of cultural portals include:
  • DigitalNZ
    DigitalNZ
    DigitalNZ is a service run by the National Library of New Zealand and funded by the New Zealand Government. It is aimed at making New Zealand digital content easier to find, share and use. To date there are over 25 million digital items available to view from over 120 partner organisations...

     – A cultural portal led by the National Library of New Zealand focused on New Zealand digital content.
  • Europeana
    Europeana
    Europeana.eu is an internet portal that acts as an interface to millions of books, paintings, films, museum objects and archival records that have been digitised throughout Europe...

     – A cultural portal for the European Union based in the National Library of the Netherlands and overseen by the Europeana Foundation.
  • Trove – A cultural portal led by the National Library of Australia focused on Australian content.
  • In development - Digital Public Library of America
    Digital Public Library of America
    The Digital Public Library of America is a project aimed at bringing about a large-scale digital public library open to all. It was launched by Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society in 2010, with major support from the Alfred P...


Corporate web portals

Corporate intranets became common during the 1990s. As intranets grew in size and complexity, webmasters were faced with increasing content and user management challenges. A consolidated view of company information was judged insufficient; users wanted personalization and customization. Webmasters, if skilled enough, were able to offer some capabilities, but for the most part ended up driving users away from using the intranet.

Many companies began to offer tools to help webmasters manage their data, applications and information more easily, and through personalized views. Portal solutions can also include workflow management, collaboration between work groups, and policy-managed content publication. Most can allow internal and external access to specific corporate information using secure authentication or single sign-on
Single sign-on
Single sign-on is a property of access control of multiple related, but independent software systems. With this property a user logs in once and gains access to all systems without being prompted to log in again at each of them...

.

JSR168 Standards emerged around 2001. Java Specification Request (JSR) 168 standards allow the interoperability of portlets across different portal platforms. These standards allow portal developers, administrators and consumers to integrate standards-based portals and portlets across a variety of vendor solutions.

The concept of content aggregation seems to still gain momentum and portal solution will likely continue to evolve significantly over the next few years. The Gartner Group predicts generation 8 portals to expand on the Business Mashups concept of delivering a variety of information, tools, applications and access points through a single mechanism.

With the increase in user generated content, disparate data silos, and file formats, information architects and taxonomist will be required to allow users the ability to tag (classify) the data. This will ultimately cause a ripple effect where users will also be generating ad hoc navigation and information flows.

Corporate Portals also offer customers & employees self-service opportunities.

Stock portals

Also known as stock-share portals, stock market
Stock market
A stock market or equity market is a public entity for the trading of company stock and derivatives at an agreed price; these are securities listed on a stock exchange as well as those only traded privately.The size of the world stock market was estimated at about $36.6 trillion...

 portals or stock exchange
Stock exchange
A stock exchange is an entity that provides services for stock brokers and traders to trade stocks, bonds, and other securities. Stock exchanges also provide facilities for issue and redemption of securities and other financial instruments, and capital events including the payment of income and...

 portals are Web-based applications that facilitates the process of informing the share-holders with substantial online data such as the latest price, ask/bids, the latest News, reports and announcements. Some stock portals use online gateways through a central depository system (CDS) for the visitors to buy or sell their shares or manage their portfolio
Portfolio (finance)
Portfolio is a financial term denoting a collection of investments held by an investment company, hedge fund, financial institution or individual.-Definition:The term portfolio refers to any collection of financial assets such as stocks, bonds and cash...

.

Health & Medical Web Portal

Health & medical portal is the biggest place where display health & medical related information around the world.
  • Emedicalpoint Biggest Health & Medical web Portal in Bangladesh
    Bangladesh
    Bangladesh , officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh is a sovereign state located in South Asia. It is bordered by India on all sides except for a small border with Burma to the far southeast and by the Bay of Bengal to the south...

    .

Tender's portals

Tender's portals stands for a gateway to search/modify/submit/archive data on tenders and professional processing of continuous online tenders.

With a tender portal the complete tendering process—submitting of proposals, assessment, administration—are done on the web.

Electronic or online tendering is just carrying out the same traditional tendering process in
an electronic form, using the Internet.

Using online tendering, bidders can do any of the following:
  • Receive notification of the tenders.
  • Receive tender documents online.
  • Fill out the forms online.
  • Submit proposals and documents.
  • Submit bids online.

Hosted web portals

Hosted web portals gained popularity a number of companies began offering them as a hosted service. The hosted portal market fundamentally changed the composition of portals. In many ways they served simply as a tool for publishing information instead of the loftier goals of integrating legacy applications or presenting correlated data from distributed databases. The early hosted portal companies such as Hyperoffice.com
Hyperoffice
HyperOffice is a privately held American corporation based in Rockville, Maryland, that offers web collaboration, online meeting, web conferencing, online database and email marketing applications to the small and mid sized business segment...

 or the now defunct InternetPortal.com focused on collaboration and scheduling in addition to the distribution of corporate data. As hosted web portals have risen in popularity their feature set has grown to include hosted databases, document management, email, discussion forums and more. Hosted portals automatically personalize the content generated from their modules to provide a personalized experience to their users. In this regard they have remained true to the original goals of the earlier corporate web portals. Emerging new classes of internet portals called Cloud Portals are showcasing the power of API (Application Programming Interface) rich software systems leveraging SOA (service oriented architecture, web services, and custom data exchange) to accommodate machine to machine interaction creating a more fluid user experience for connecting users spanning multiple domains during a given "session". Leading cloud portals like Nubifer Cloud Portal: http://www.nubifer.com/SaaS-pass-hass-cloud-products/top-tier-cloud-platforms.html showcase what is possible using Enterprise Mashup and Web Service integration approaches to building cloud portals.

Domain-specific portals

A number of portals have come about that are specific to the particular domain, offering access to related companies and services, a prime example of this trend would be the growth in property portals that give access to services such as estate agent
Estate agent
An estate agent is a person or business that arranges the selling, renting or management of properties, and other buildings, in the United Kingdom and Ireland. An agent that specialises in renting is often called a letting or management agent...

s, removal firm
Moving company
A moving company, removalist, or van line is a company that helps people and businesses relocate their goods from one place to another. Typically they use moving vans, but for international moves or where storage is required, they may use special containerised vans or shipping containers.National...

, and solicitor
Solicitor
Solicitors are lawyers who traditionally deal with any legal matter including conducting proceedings in courts. In the United Kingdom, a few Australian states and the Republic of Ireland, the legal profession is split between solicitors and barristers , and a lawyer will usually only hold one title...

s that offer conveyancing
Licensed Conveyancer
A Licensed Conveyancer is a specialist legal professional in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia or South Africa who has been trained to deal with all aspects of property law.Typically, their tasks might include:...

. Along the same lines, industry-specific news and information portals have appeared, such as the clinical trials specific portal
Clinical Trial Portal
A clinical trial portal is a web portal or enterprise portal that primarily serves sponsors and investigators in a clinical trial...

: IFPMA Clinical Trials Portal

Engineering aspects

The main concept is to present the user with a single web page that brings together or aggregates content from a number of other systems or servers. For portals that present application functionality to the user, the portal server is in reality the front piece of a server configuration that includes some connectivity to the application server. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is one example of how a portal can be used to deliver application server content and functionality. The application server or architecture performs the actual functions of the application. This application server is in turn connected to database servers, and may be part of a clustered server environment. High-capacity portal configurations may include load balancing equipment. SOAP, an xml-based protocol, may be used for servers to communicate within this architecture.

The server hosting the portal may only be a "pass through" for the user. By use of portlets, application functionality can be presented in any number of portal pages. For the most part, this architecture is transparent to the user.

In such a scheme, security and capacity can be important features, and administrators need to ensure that only an authorized visitor or user can generate requests to the application server. If administration does not ensure this aspect, then the portal may inadvertently present vulnerabilities to various types of attacks.
[see also articles on SOAP and SOA]

Standards

  • Web Services for Remote Portlets v1
    Web Services for Remote Portlets
    Web Services for Remote Portlets is an OASIS-approved network protocol standard designed for communications with remote portlets.-Overview:...

  • JSR 168 (Java Portlet Definition Standard)
  • JSR 286 (Java Portlet v2.0 Definition Standard)

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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