Thursday, October 14, 2004

Portal, digital library - what's the difference?  Portal is not just a marketing term.  According to portalscommunity http://www.portalscommunity.com/library/fundamentals.cfm the technical components of portals are: "Application Server - Examples of application servers include iPlanet, BEA WebLogic, IBM Websphere, Oracle 9iAS and Sybase Application Server. Many of the application server vendors are incorporating "portals" as add-ons to their base product. For example, IBM Websphere Portal Server, Oracle Portal, BEA Portal and Sybase Enterprise Portal are all built on top of the corresponding application server and in some cases are sold as one package. Web Server - The Web Server works in conjunction with the application server to provide the run-time environment for client requests. The web servers used with portals are standard HTTP web servers, such as Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), apache, etc. ... The web server then passes the request to the application server. Database - Most portals have an underlying database (such as Oracle, DB2, Sybase, or SQL Server) that they use to keep track of information specific to the portal - such as users, personalization settings, available web services/Portlets and security. This use of the database is in addition to a transactional system's database (e.g. ERP, CRM or SCM system) that a portal might query to present application specific data to end users. Taxonomy - A taxonomy is a classification scheme to organize a collection of information. ...Most enterprise portals have a taxonomy for this purpose, as well as some may have automatically generated taxonomies generated based upon the metadata provided. Crawler - A crawler is an automated process that reads, indexes and classifies documents at a pre-determined interval. A web crawler, for instance, would crawl target web pages periodically to determine if the content has changed. The content is then indexed into the taxonomy so that end users can easily find it. The crawler doesn't necessarily make another copy of the crawled document; rather it indexes it by creating a virtual card that describes the document. The card then lives in the portal index. Metadata repository - A metadata repository contains metadata about the content within the portal and about the structure of that content. This includes the metadata about the taxonomy, as well as the metadata for the individual documents. For example, each of the documents placed in a folder called Clients might have a metadata field called "Client" which would have one or more values. The value of the Client field for a particular document is metadata about that document. Portlet - A Portlet can be thought of as a "building block" of a portal. It is a user-interface for presenting data and functionality from multiple applications on a single web page. Portlets encompass the presentation layer and the business logic. They also tie into the back end data sources.... Categorization Engine - A categorization engine is used for sorting documents into the folders of a taxonomy. The categorization engine may do this based on metadata in the documents, based on business rules, based on the content of the document, based on search criteria or filters, or some other scheme. Filters - A filter is generally available in a taxonomy to restrict the documents that are admitted into a particular folder, or that are returned as part of a search. A filter can be word based (if a document has the word 'IBM"), concept based (if the document is like this other document), or rule based (if the field called CLIENT has a value of IBM). Index - An index is a collection of information that allows for fast query and retrieval. Within the context of a portal, an Index is usually a combination of a full-text index and a meta-data repository for the documents/content that is included within the portal. Virtual Card - Within an index or metadata repository, a virtual card is a description of a single document or piece of content within the portal. The card usually contains information about where the content physically resides, and contains the values of one or more metadata fields about that document. The card is the "placeholder" for the document within the portal. Web Service - A web service is a program that accepts and responds to requests over the Internet. Typically, a web service accepts requests in an XML-based format. The actual format of the request and the response depends on the XML standards that are being used. One such standard is SOAP. There are public registries and languages - such as UDDI, WSDL - which are used to catalog the different available web services. A calling program can query the registry (UDDI) to find an appropriate web service, then use WSDL to figure out which parameters the service needs, and finally use a calling protocol and XML standard like SOAP to actually make the call to the Web Service. Development Standards and Protocols - A very important component of any development project is to understand what the current industry standards are for developing Portal Solutions and how they relate to each other." A brief list of the most common ones are. XML - Extensible Markup Language. XSL, XSLT - Acronyms for Extensible Stylesheet Language and Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation.  DTD and XSD - Document Type Definition and XML Schema Definition. WSDL - Acronym for Web Services Description Language. SOAP - Acronym for Simple Object Access Protocol. UDDI - Universal Description Discovery and Integration.  WSUI - Web Services User Interface. User Profiles - Each Portal contains a profile for each of its users. This profile is used for customization and personalization. Each of the Portlets in a portal has access to this user profile and can use it to store preference information about a user or a class of users. This profile is also how the user "configures" the home page of a portal and chooses which Portlets show up and what information they should show. Content Management System - Most enterprise portals contain a Content Management System, which allows approved end users to submit information into the portal. ... EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) - EAI serves as the umbrella term for all software and services meant to integrate enterprise applications with one another. ..." comment []5:34:08 PM

© Copyright 2005 Anita S. Coleman. Last update: 8/15/2005; 11:47:30 PM.