The Subject Portals Project: A General Overview

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The Subject Portals ProjectA General Overview

• Marieke Guy, UKOLN
• m.guy_at_ukoln.ac.uk
• Jasper Tredgold, ILRT
• jasper.tredgold_at_bristol.ac.uk

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The Subject Portals Project

• Originally
• 2 year project funded by JISC as part of the 5/99
  Learning and Teaching programme ended August
  2003
• Started life as Subject Access to the DNER
  (SAD!) research project which developed
  prototype subject portals for Hubs
• Now
• SPP phase II runs from Sep 2003 August 2004
• Part of the JISC Portals programme

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RDN Partners
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Lead Partners
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Portals Defined

• Definition
• 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 collates
  this into an aggregated form for presentation to
  the user, usually via a website. (JISC)

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Typical Portal Features

• Single Point of Access for particular audience
• Broad array of resources and services brought
  together from 1 source
• Sense of community
• Customisation, personalisation, integration
• Portal Types - Subject Portals, Data Type
  Portals, User Community Portals, Institutional
  Portals

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Project Rationale

• Current UK HE/FE Information Environment
• Lots of disparate information services
• Each with its own user interface
• Many interfaces to learn, search, and to keep up
  to date with
• JISC 5 Year Strategy for the IE
• Clear need to enhance discovery of and access to
  content
• Concept to provide seamless discovery across
  multiple content providers

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Picture of IE
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Aims of SPP

• The portalisation of RDN services
• To provide seamless access to a range of subject
  based information resources for users in the UK
  Higher and Further Education community (and
  beyond)
• Can use same technology to surface subject based
  content in third party environments e.g.
  Institutional portals, VLEs

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Subject Portals ProjectPhase 1 Demonstrator
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Design
User
Portal Services
Portal
Authentication
Newsfeeds
Search
Search App
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Portal Functions

• Core
• Authentication
• Customisation
• User data storage
• Portlets
• Searching
• Newsfeeds
• Alerting

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Authentication

• National Scheme
• Athens Single Sign On
• Authorisation profile
• Local Scheme
• LDAP
• Account creation
• RDN-wide profile

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Customisation

• Portal customisation provided by framework
• Navigation
• Look and feel
• Portlet selection and layout
• Portlet customisation provided by portlet
• API hooks

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Searching

• Parallel cross searching
• Z39.50 mainly, but extensible
• Newsfeed searching, alerting
• Athens compliant
• Single consistent interface
• Search history
• Record storage

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Newsfeeds and Alerting

• Newsfeeds
• RSS1.0 extensible
• Events, subject information
• Searchable
• Alerting
• Email alerts available to registered users
• Created from users subject interests and
  selected sources
• Newsfeed based, but extensible

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Demonstrator

• http//www.portal.ac.uk/spp/demo/

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Modular Development

• Portlets and portals
• Installation choices
• Non-framework specific
• freeing us to embed portlets in other portal
  environments, i.e. uPortal
• Demonstrator based on Apache Jetspeed portal
  framework

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Standards (1)

• Emerging portal standards
• JSR168
• Java portlet standard
• WSRP
• Remote portlet communication protocol
• Portals aggregate remote portlets

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Standards (2)
Portal Server
Browser
HTTP
WSRP
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Current Work
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Current Work (1)

• Ongoing maintenance and further development of
  the portal services
• Development of additional services
• Installation of beta portal software at the 8 RDN
  sites
• uPortal integration
• Open Source

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Current Work (2)

• Surfacing content elsewhere
• VLEs, Institutional portals
• Looking at the outcomes from other JISC
  programmes (DiVLE, FAIR, X4L)
• Investigate interaction between portals and
  shared services (IESR)
• Evaluation of the impact on users
• Exit strategy

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Questions

• Any questions?