Portal Projects Research Articles

Portal‐Masked Environment Map Sampling

AbstractWe present a technique to efficiently importance sample distant, all‐frequency illumination in indoor scenes. Standard environment sampling is inefficient in such cases since the distant lighting is typically only visible through small openings (e.g. windows). This visibility is often addressed by manually placing a portal around each window to direct samples towards the openings; however, uniformly sampling the portal (its area or solid angle) disregards the possibly high frequency environment map. We propose a new portal importance sampling technique which takes into account both the environment map and its visibility through the portal, drawing samples proportional to the product of the two. To make this practical, we propose a novel, portal‐rectified reparametrization of the environment map with the key property that the visible region induced by a rectangular portal projects to an axis‐aligned rectangle. This allows us to sample according to the desired product distribution at an arbitrary shading location using a single (precomputed) summed‐area table per portal. Our technique is unbiased, relevant to many renderers, and can also be applied to rectangular light sources with directional emission profiles, enabling efficient rendering of non‐diffuse light sources with soft shadows.

Providing semantic metadata to online learning resources on sustainable agriculture and farming: combining values and technical knowledge

Sustainable or organic agriculture aims at harmonizing the efficient production of food with the preservation of the environmental conditions for continuing production in a sustained way. As such, it embodies a set of environmental values that are currently taught and learnt worldwide in specific courses or as part of broader programs or curricula. The increased availability of online, open learning resources enables new possibilities for education in the domain of sustainable agriculture and farming. Concretely, portal projects related to sustainable agriculture have been deployed in the last years, using metadata as a mechanism to make resource search more effective in large, multilingual, and heterogeneous content databases. As environmental values are part of the learning needs targeted by those systems, it is required that both axiological descriptions (relating to values) and technical information (related to domain-specific issues) are expressed through metadata records, which requires a clear differentiation of both kinds of descriptions. This article reports on a knowledge modeling approach that fulfils that need and that can be used for the annotation of learning resources using standardized metadata schemas as IEEE LOM. The model has been prepared for the annotation of learning resources in a cross-national federation of organic agriculture repositories called Organic.Edunet, enabling the combination of both kinds of aspects in the formulation of searches. An analytic assessment of the expressive capabilities of the approach is provided using example resources.

Using the Building Blocks

This article is a case study that explores the use of the Building Blocks portal design framework over a series of enterprise portal projects spanning several years. This article describes the business contexts that shaped each portal as it was designed, showing the use and reuse of design and development elements based on the Building Blocks. This article discusses the changes and adaptations that shaped the elements of the Building Blocks design framework over time.

A framework for portal implementation: A case for Saudi organizations

Portals provide an aggregated and personalized view of information through a large application integrating information, people, and processes across organizational boundaries. As such, portals can significantly impact organizations, completely changing how they work and operate. In addition, many critical success factors can affect portals at any stage of implementation. Many organizations lack suitable frameworks for implementing portals to ensure success in the organization, customer satisfaction, and employee morale. To address this gap, we proposed a comprehensive framework to develop and operate portal projects by considering specific critical success factors. We have evaluated and compared this work with previous work in the same field, more accurate and significant results.

Online Biodiversity Resources - Principles for Usability

Online biodiversity portals and databases enabling access to large volumes of biological information represent a potentially extensive set of resources for a variety of user groups. However, in order for these resources to live up to their promise they need to be both useful and easy to use. We discuss a number of principles for designing systems for usability, examine how these have been applied to the development of online biodiversity resources and compare this with a portal project developed by the Astrophysics community. We highlight a lack of user involvement and formalised requirements analysis by biodiversity projects resulting in a poor understanding of both the users and their tasks. We suggest a change in the way large biodiversity portal projects are structured, that is by providing infrastructure and supporting user groups developing individual interfaces.

Critical success factors for implementing enterprise portals

PurposeThe goal of this paper is to discuss critical success factors (CSF) for implementing enterprise portals by comparing them with CSF for ERP implementations.Design/methodology/approachIn order to identify and rank CSF for portal implementations, the paper followed a multi‐method design, following a two‐stage approach with the first stage analyzing the state‐of‐the‐art of portal implementation by interviewing portal integrators in Germany and a follow‐up stage with a focus on CSF, thereby identifying and analyzing the CSF for portal (implementation) projects in general and across project stages. Then the findings are compared with the results of a similar study on CSF in ERP (implementation) projects.FindingsWhen comparing CSF for portal projects with CSF of ERP projects, some similarities were found but also some differences with respect to top management support, project management, communication, selection of the software package and business process re‐engineering.Research limitations/implicationsThere are limitations with regard to the comparability of both studies as both studies used different samples.Practical implicationsBased on these findings, measures to improve the engineering and management of portals can be proposed and developed.Originality/valueUp to now, there are neither detailed studies focusing on the identification and evaluation of CSF for portal projects nor studies that try to compare portal and ERP projects. The paper tries to fill this gap.

Portals: Where We Are and the Road Ahead

This article aims to give an overview of the current position of the legal portal market (primarily law firms) and to offer some predictions for the road ahead. The key areas covered will include:[bull ] What are portals? Some basic definitions[bull ] Why might you need a portal?[bull ] What can you do with a portal?[bull ] Where we are at present with portals: technologies and usage[bull ] Key considerations for portal projects[bull ] Future predictions for legal portals

Library portals and enterprise portals: Why libraries need to be at the centre of enterprise portal projects

While librarians have been focusing on the transition from the Library OPAC to the Library Portal, through the addition of meta-search gateways, their parent institutions are starting to develop institution-wide portals (often called ‘enterprise port

Library portals and enterprise portals: Why libraries need to be at the centre of enterprise portal projects

While librarians have been focusing on the transition from the Library OPAC to the Library Portal, through the addition of meta-search gateways, their parent institutions are starting to develop in...

Accessing Egypt: making myths and producing web sites in cyber-Cairo

From an anthropological viewpoint, “accessibility” is not so much a technological and design project as it is a cultural construction, a cognitive schema through which graphic designers and technologists imagine audiences and create appropriate graphic designs that will be “accessible” to that audience. The ethnographer's task is the specification of key actors, institutions and discourses active in the making and remaking of accessibility in a given context. In this article, we examine how Egyptian Web producers at the turn of millennium (1999–2001) sought to design Web portals that would allow the “typical” Egyptian to easily access the World Wide Web. We argue, first, that Egyptian Web producers are deeply influenced by national and international discourses that frame IT as a national mission for socioeconomic development. Second, we found that in the absence of clear definitions of the Web audience, Web producers imagined a “typical” Egyptian that contradicted their own experiences of users of the Web. Finally, we found that Egyptian Web producers largely borrowed pre-existing models, using design elements to “inflect” their sites with an Egyptian motif. However, the conceptual models of access and related design strategies created by Egyptian Web producers were out of touch with Egyptian social realities, contributing to a collapse of most Web portal projects.

Portals in libraries. Assessment and outcomes

Portals in libraries. Assessment and outcomes

Book Review: "Enterprise Knowledge Portals: Next-Generation Portal Solutions for Dynamic Information Access, Better Decision Making and Maximum Results"

Enterprise Knowledge Portals is a very practical and ready-to-use book for KM practitioners looking to bridge the gap between theory and implementation. The level of details regarding portal tools and implementation roadmaps makes for an excellent step-by-step guide for KM practice. The nine chapters are divided into four sections: portal definitions, programs, projects and infrastructure. The material includes lots of templates, questionnaires, activities, tasks, draft memos, screen snapshots, checklists and suggestions. Heidi Collins is Knowledge Officer at Air Products and Chemicals, author of Corporate Portals and a prolific writer on KM topics. “The enterprise knowledge portal is the intersection between knowledge management and the enterprise portal,” Collins begins. It helps provide consistent views of the organisations, personalised access for employees, layered presentation, cross-media communication, improved involvement, and learning behaviours for quick adaptation to changed surroundings. Key objectives of a KM solution should be to facilitate communication, be organised around work processes, focus on the future, support business objectives, promote innovation and maintain a knowledge-creating organisation for multiple target communities. “Challenges of change management, intellectual growth and partnership development in the organisation should not be overlooked,” Collins cautions. Workers need to be “self-starters” and take the initiative, and managers should continually plan for “what-if” scenarios. The enterprise portal server is a collection of servers providing services like directory and security, rules (for workflow), components (applications), personalisation, metadata, business intelligence, transaction, and library objects. Vendor selection should be governed by considerations like presentation (intuitive interface), application integration, knowledge organisation, search/index and personalisation features. The early stages of portal vision should include documentation of organisation mission and KM objectives; Collins provides a sample questionnaire with 45 items covering issues ranging from success indicators and process improvement to mentoring roles and employee empowerment. These can then be cross-tallied and ranked in a table which includes IT-enabled tools (e.g., messaging, mining, and balanced scorecard), depending on whether the features are viewed as critical, must have, important, or nice to have. The output of this analysis will be a request for a proposal to portal vendors. The next phase after this portal map exercise is creating the enterprise knowledge portal (EKP) program. The program covers methodology, timeline and roles for portal design and implementation. The EKP Program Charter should address portal scope, stakeholders, benefits, risks, budgeting and communication. The Portal Requirements Template should address IT framework, work processes and product features. Program Tasks include policies (e.g., compliance), standards, monitoring and archives.

Institutional Portals: a Review of Outputs

This literature review was undertaken as part of the Presenting natiOnal Resources To Audiences Locally (PORTAL) project( Information on the PORTAL project is available at http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/index.html or from Ian Dolphin, Director, PORTAL Project, University of Hull, United Kingdom (i.dolphin@hull.ac.uk) which is funded to explore issues around the deployment and use of portals within the higher and further education community. The project is partnership between Academic Services at the University of Hull and UKOLN at the University of Bath. The aim of this review is to provide readers new to institutional portals with an introduction to the topic and an overview of the outputs from a number of institutional portal activities. The paper looks at the factors motivating the deployment of portal solutions in the education sector, at the outputs of existing deployments and at the potential outcomes of such developments. The outputs are considered under the three areas of development outlined in the Joint Information Systems Committee's (JISC) definition of an institutional portal: information resources, transactional services and collaborative tools. The review provides examples of developments from a range of institutional portal projects in the UK and North America.

Campus portals: Supportive mechanisms for university communication, collaboration, and organizational change

CAMPUS PORTALS have become a topic of frequent discussion on many campuses. Should campuses consider creating a portal project and if so, what should be the approach? Beginning with an introduction to campus portals and possible features they may contain, nine strategies are presented for portal projects. Collaborative mechanisms to develop and implement portal projects are suggested and criteria for the determination of campus portal readiness listed. Potential pitfalls and implementation challenges for this process are discussed. Finally, the potential values from a campus portal project and future possibilities for portals are outlined.