These FAQs answer common questions relating to portals and the JISC Information Environment. Additional FAQs can be found on the UKOLN website.
Select a topic:
General questions
Subject portals
What is a portal?
Technically, a portal is a network service that brings together content from diverse distributed resources using technologies such as cross searching, harvesting, and alerting, and collate this into an amalgamated form for presentation to the user. This presentation is usually via a web browser, though other means are also possible. For users, a portal is a, possibly personalised, common point of access where searching can be carried out across one or more than one resource and the amalgamated results viewed. Information may also be presented via other means, for example, alerting services and conference listings or links to e-prints and learning materials.
How does a portal differ from a gateway or a hub?
Gateways and hubs are sites on the web that provide access to descriptions of and links to other sites on the web. They carry out a similar role to portals insofar as they bring information together, but this information is only about the sources of content, not the actual content itself. Gateways and hubs allow you to discover where the content is, but they still require you to go to the site of the content to get it. Portals bring the content to you.
Why are JISC developing portals?
JISC has built up a collection of resources that provide high-quality content to the Higher and Further Education (HE/FE) community for learning, teaching and research. As Internet resources of educational value have grown, the need has arisen to be able to search across many of these resources to discover and retrieve relevant information. Portals will allow the user to retrieve this information from across these resources via a single interface without having to search each one individually.
How do portals fit into the JISC Information Environment?
Portals are an integral part of the JISC Information Environment (IE). The IE Technical Architecture diagrams show them as the point where content is brought together for display to the user. Thus, JISC portals will be involved in fusion and presentation activities. The IE Draft Development Strategy has incorporated this approach into the Portals and Fusion Programme, which is building and developing portals and portal technologies for use within the Information Environment. The Information Environment itself relies on a number of, possibly distributed, systems interacting with each other, each with their own role to play, portals and content providers being two of these. Interoperability is a key to this interaction and all parts of the IE are being developed with this in mind. The key technologies that support interoperability between JISC portals and content providers within the Information Environment are Z39.50, the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and Resource Discovery Framework (RDF) Site Summary (RSS). Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) standard are also being investigated and all technologies are reviewed regularly to ensure the highest level of interoperability.
Where is content provided from?
Within the boundaries of the JISC Collections Strategy, anywhere, so long as the content is made available so the portal can search or harvest it. This can include flat web sites, databases, directories, registries, etc. It also includes content that is not directly available via the web, again so long as the content has been made available for the portal to access. JISC IE portals will be designed to be able to access all relevant content where JISC has licences for the HE/FE community and where access is free. Within institutions, therefore, the portals will enable access to all relevant content and resources that your institution has signed up for plus what is freely available.
How do you make the content available?
Content can be made available either as itself or via the metadata that is attached to the content. Within the JISC Information Environment, the content and/or metadata can then be retrieved using the technologies already mentioned: Z39.50 or SOAP for searching; OAI-PMH for harvesting. A portal can amalgamate data retrieved via both these methods. In addition, a portal can also be alerted to new content via RSS channels and linked to supporting infrastructure registries and services via Z39.50 or UDDI.
What portals are JISC developing?
Research carried out by JISC has suggested the need for portals that provide distinct access to subject-based content, format-based content, and content aimed at particular user communities within HE/FE, accepting that these overlap to some degree. As such, a series of subject portals are currently under development (see Subject portals topic) and there are plans for an image portal, a time-based media portal, a geospatial data portal, an A&I database portal, and a learning & teaching portal. Possible developments include an archives portal, an e-books portal and a research portal.
If a portal is supposed to be able to bring all the information I need together, why all the different portals?
JISC has always aimed to provide a variety of ways for the HE/FE community to access the quality resources that are available. A similar approach is being taken with portals, insofar that different users may wish to access the content they require via different routes, according to the work/study context in which they are searching. A non-JISC example of this would be an institutional portal, which is aimed at users within the context of a certain institution.
What is an institutional portal?
An institutional portal provides a personalised, single point of access to the online resources that support members of an institution in all aspects of their learning, teaching, research and other activities. The resources may be internal or external and include local and remote 'information resources' (books, journals, databases, Web-sites, learning objects, images, student information systems etc.), 'transaction-based services' (room bookings, finance, registration, assignment submission, assessment, etc.) and 'collaborative tools' (calendars, email, chat, etc.). Access to many of these resources is usually restricted to authenticated members of the institution. In some cases the institutional portal may provide a view of institutional resources to end-users outside the institution, for example alumni and prospective students.
Will JISC portals and institutional portals end up in competition with each other?
No. Having a number of different access points or views to relevant information will allow users to access the portal that best suits them in the context of their work/study. For example, this may be according to the particular piece of work they are doing or how or where they are accessing the resources. However, JISC portal functionality is also being designed so that it can also be embedded in other environments (portal or otherwise) - as opposed to being used just via a specific website - so that users can benefit from this regardless of context.
What is the relationship between a portal and Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)?
A VLE provides an online framework that supports the end-user in their learning activities within a particular pedagogic context. Typically, the VLE will provide support for the delivery of learning materials, learner assessment, collaborative tools, course registration, etc
A VLE will normally also provide access to information resources that support the learner in their activities. In order to do this, the VLE may offer portal functionality directly, or may link to or import functionality from an external portal in some way. For example, the Blackboard Resource Centre offers portal functionality to users of the Blackboard VLE (both learners and tutors) to enable them to discover information and learning resources.
What is the difference between a 'shallow' and a 'deep' portal?
A shallow portal is the same as a gateway or hub (see above), whereas a deep portal allows access to the content. The shallow-deep analogy can be used to distinguish between those sites that expect you to go to the content and those which bring the content to you, respectively. As such, JISC portals are deep portals.
Is a portal just a clever search across different resources then?
Yes, and no! A key feature of portals is their ability to search across many distributed resources. However, portals can also make information available through other means (e.g., RSS). In addition, different data types are often best presented outside the context of a search. Hence, portals can bring information together through a variety of routes and present it in a variety of ways. Within the Information Environment, alerting services, associated learning materials, conference lists and access to e-prints are amongst those additional services being investigated.
Is there a difference between portals in the JISC Information Environment and portals built outside this with commercial portal software or Internet portals such as MyNetscape?
Insofar as portals outside the Information Environment and Internet portals bring together information from diverse sources, then no, there is no difference. However, both are often based around proprietary software that may prevent flexibility about what content can be made available, whereas JISC portals will be built with the aim of encouraging linking to as much content as possible. Having said that, JISC portals will also have a focus on making available high-quality content resources aimed specifically at those working and studying within Further and Higher Education.
How do JISC portals relate to enterprise portals?
Enterprise portals is a name given to portals commonly, though not exclusively, in industry in the US that are often built using commercial portal software. They are usually either a framework for integrating diverse internal and/or external information and transactional resources or a front end to existing applications, and are specifically aimed at adding value to employees' everyday work. Often, a major feature of these is real-time information display and all offer a personalised view to the information. By virtue of aggregating data and adding value, JISC, and many institutional, portals could be said to be aiming to be educational enterprise portals.
The personalisation aspects of enterprise portals and MyNetscape etc, sound useful.
A portal can bring together many different types of content from many distributed sources. However, for any one user not all of these may be of interest. Hence, the concept of 'My Portal' is one where the user can select which content sources are presented to her/him. This is usually flexible, so that the user can change this selection as required. JISC IE portals are examining such personalisation within the overall portal and within the context of the user, e.g., institutional context.
What is a portlet?
In the context of personalisation and embedding, portals can achieve this through creating distinct building blocks of functionality, e.g., cross-search, alerting, listing, and each one offering a visible component to the user. Each building block is known as a portlet. These can be joined together to create a portal environment, within which various degrees of personalisation can be incorporated, or embedded within a separate environment as required. Portlets feature heavily in many of the current portal building frameworks such as the Apache Jetspeed project, IBM's WebSphere Portal Server and Oracle's Application Server Portal.
Back to top
Subject portals
Subject portals are one of three portal development areas that have been identified by JISC. The questions here provide brief information on these.
Who is developing subject portals?
The Subjects Portals Project is a JISC funded development and is being managed by Julie Stuckes who is based at UKOLN at the University of Bath. The development work is being carried out by a team of people based across four of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) hubs: BIOME, EEVL, HUMBUL, and SOSIG, plus technical staff at the Institute for Learning Research Technology (ILRT) in Bristol. The PSIgate hub is also developing portal technology in co-ordination with the other four.
Are the portals a project or part of the existing services?
The development of the technology for the portals is very much a project, albeit a project that is taking place in the context of existing services. Subject to evaluation and testing, it is hoped that the results of the portals project will subsequently be implemented at the hubs, at which point they will become part of the existing services.
How do they relate to the RDN?
The RDN is the network of services that encompasses the various hubs. Whilst the portals project is ongoing, the RDN is still primarily concerned with the services, as they currently exist. However, the RDN is also involved with preparatory work for the development of the hubs as they incorporate the portal technology from the project.
What subject portals are being developed?
Portals are being developed at all the current RDN hubs, and will cover the same subject disciplines. The existing hubs are at: BIOME, EEVL, HUMBUL, PSIgate, and SOSIG. In addition, three new hubs planned for 2003 are in development, which will adopt the portal technology as part of their creation. These are ALTIS (covering Sport, Leisure, Tourism and Hospitality), GESOURCE (Geography and the Environment), and ARTIFACT (Creative Arts and Industries). Other subject portals will be considered for development as the need arises.
Back to top