Portals

Portals

Introduction

A portal (or Web portal) presents information from diverse sources in a unified way. A Web site that offers a broad array of resources and services, such as e-mail, forums, search engines, online shopping are referred to as portal. The first portals grow out of online services, such as AOL, and provided access to the Web, but by now most of the traditional search engines have transformed themselves into Web portals to attract and keep a larger audience. Apart from the basic search engine feature, these portals often offer services such as e-mail, news, stock prices, information, and entertainment.

Portals provide a way for enterprises, research and other communities to generate a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether. In a research environment a portal integrates online scientific services into single Web environment which can be accessed and managed from a standard Web browser. The most remarkable benefit of portals is that they simplify the interaction of users with distributed systems and with each other, because a single tool – the browser – and a standard and widely accepted network protocol – HTTP – can be used through all communications.

After the proliferation of Web browsers in the mid-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. Similarly, but a bit later, research communities recognized the value of Web portals in integrating various services into coherent, customizable environments. Research collaborations began developing portals in the late 1990. These environments can be broadly categorized as horizontal portals, which cover many areas, and vertical portals, which are focused on one functional area. Horizontal research portals often provide services that are independent from any scientific discipline and represent generic functionalities that are common across disciplines. Vertical portals target specific group of researchers that are involved in the same experiment or work within the same scientific field.

Portals for distributed science

In the simplest form a scientific portal is a collection of links to external Web pages and Web services that are scattered on the Internet and aimed to serve scientists with similar interest. These portals often include search engines that are customized for the interest of the user community, e.g. for publications, job positions, news from a scientific domain. Various research communities, ranging from mathematics to art and humanities, all have their own portals, sometimes even multiple portals localized for different geographical regions and languages.