Portal

Definition

• A portal is a door or entrance ...

• A web portal is a website that offers various services through a centralized interface.

Typology

• Information portals: news, blogs, etc.
• Transaction portals: sales
• Collaboration portals

Most popular kinds

This is not a strict classification. Some of the entries may also have traits from other categories. In particular, business or educational organizations may centralize all services in some kind of "vertical portal" (with various access rights).

Information

• Large Internet access portals, such as Yahoo or MSN
• Information portals such as CNN
• Participatory information portals such as Slahsdot

Expertise and knowledge portals

• Experience sharing portals such as epinions
• Collaborative encyclopedias such as the Wikipedia
• (Specific) knowledge management portals

Commerce and service

• Commerce Portals, such as Amazon
• Service portals, such as Swiss railways
• Commerce and service portals also can be categorized as a combination of "B2x" portals:
  • business-to-employee electronic commerce (B2E) portal
  • business-to-consumer (B2C)
  • business-to-business (B2B)
  • business-to-dealer/distributor (B2D)
  • business-to-government (B2G)

Intranets

• Enterprise portals (frameworks for integrating information, applications, and processes across organizational boundaries)
• Campus-wide information and adminstration systems
• Learning management systems

Community

• Community of practice portals such as the TECFA portal
• Community of interest portals such linux.
• Educational portals that engage learners in various writing activities (e.g. C3MS and that are at least half open to the public.

Technology-based typology

• "Heavy" portalware (to build enterprise or global university portals, etc.)
• Content management systems
• Learning management systems (LMS)
• C3MS (Community potals)
• Wikis
• Blogs (at least some that contain more than just diary entries)
• Groupwares
• Knowledge management systems

Technology

Portalware

• Most open source portalware is based on some sort of LAMP architecture, but java-based architectures are also popular (in particular within computer science communities). See various categories above.
• Enterprise portals probably rely mostly on some java-based technolgy, although the Microsoft .Net architecture is gaining in popularity.

Standards

• Web services
  • Transport, e.g. HTTP
  • XML-based messaging, e.g. XML-RPC, SOAP or REST
  • Service descirpiton, e.g. WSDL
  • Service discovery
• In the Java World:
  • Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE),
  • Portlets (JSR 168
• Data standards
  • In DSchneider's opinion, there is a blatant lack of data standards, e.g. it is very difficult to move data from platform to an other.
  • In education, various IMS standards try to address this issue.