The Power of Resource Sharing: The RDN Subject Portals Project

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The Power of Resource Sharing The RDN Subject
Portals Project

• Ruth Martin
• Subject Portals Project Manager UKOLN

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The Subject Portals Project (SPP)

• 2 year project, ending August 2003
• Funded by JISC as part of its 5/99 DNER
  Enhancement call
• Started life as Subject Access to the DNER
  acronym SAD!
• Now known as SPP (mercifully)

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RDN partners
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Two other partners
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So, what is a subject portal?

• Tailored view of the web within a particular
  subject area
• Ability to cross-search specially selected
  resources
• Single authentication/authorisation at log-on

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Subject portals continued...

• Storage of user profiles
• Alerting service
• Newsfeeds
• Additional services jobs listings web resource
  catalogues e-journal search engine etc.

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The aim?
Seamless access to a range of specially selected
high-quality information resources for users in
the UK Higher and Further Education community
(and beyond).
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Modular development

• Development of portlets, not portals
• Gives hubs choice of which functions to install
• Non-framework specific, freeing us to embed
  portlets in other portal environments
• Currently using Jetspeed but interested in
  uPortal

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The architecture

• Core
• Portal framework
• Authentication
• User profiling
• Storage for user data
• Available to all portlets
• Portlets
• Framework provides portlet API

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Portal framework

• Jetspeed
• Apache open source java portal framework
• Provides user interface layer and routes user
  interactions to portlets
• Provides tools for personalising layout, portlet
  selection etc.
• Design allows for other portal frameworks
• Bridge code hides framework specifics
• Java Community Process portal standards

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Account management

• SPP authentication module
• Replaces frameworks system
• Provides
• 1) national authentication
• e.g. Athens Single Sign-On
• 2) local authentication
• e.g. LDAP
• Provides a profile of users access rights to
  various resources

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Work with Athens

• Athens Single Sign-On (SSO) allows publishers to
  implement the Athens agent to allow users to log
  on once and move between Athens-protected
  resources
• Athens Devolved Authentication (DA) allows an
  institution to use its local authentication
  system to authorise access to Athens-protected
  resources

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Work with Athens

• SPP team collaborating with Athens to upgrade its
  API to ensure that both mechanisms work in a
  portal environment
• The power of resource sharing!
• But, flexible approach having to be taken.

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Account management

• Aim for portal to act as broker between user and
  the authentication service on behalf of the
  resource provider
• And thus enable users to enter credentials only
  once, at log-on, for every resource they are
  authorised to use
• A relationship of trust

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Cross-searching

• Resources selected by the hubs to reflect subject
  interests
• Wish-list of 140 resources work on-going to
  include as many as possible
• Most, but not all are JISC IE resources
• Supporting Z39.50 compliant targets at present
  but hope to extend this to other protocols such
  as XML, OAI, SOAP etc.

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More on cross-searching

• Work has involved negotiating with resource
  providers for access to resources
• Advantage of increased visibility of resources
• On-going support from resource providers crucial

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The future

• Movement from project to service (watch this
  space between September-December 2003)
• Continuing technical development
• - exploring feasibility of embedding portal
  functions into institutional portals, VLEs etc
• - offering portlets as open source developments
• A great team!

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Contacts
Ruth Martin Project Manager UKOLN University of
Bath r.martin_at_ukoln.ac.uk
Jasper Tredgold Technical Co-ordinator ILRT Univer
sity of Bristol jasper.tredgold_at_bristol.ac.uk
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And dont forget

• The Subject Portals Project Features and
  Functionality
• Richard Young, Malcolm Moffat, Francisco Pinto
  and Michael Fraser
• Thursday, 4pm, under Track B
• Dont miss it!