Back to dissertation.
Abstract
My background research is focusing on understanding the web functionally and technically in order to define the current and future needs of a vertical portal.
A vertical portal is a web site that provides a gateway or portal to information related to a particular community.
My research emphasizes the convergence of the social web and the future of web as main media.
This thought focuses mainly on:
- Web history: past and future.
What was the web ten, fifteen years ago? What is it nowadays?
This dissertation gives you a taste of what the web should be in few years. This vision is both functional and technical.
- Social web and new mass media : web 2.0 features
Here we talk about "many-to-many", "web 2.0", "web 3.0", communities, long tails, multi-media, multi-devices, UI, accessibility, trust and many other topics related to vertical portals.
Functional evolutions are always linked to technical evolutions: we talk about AJAX, Semantic Web, RSS, Widgets, Web Services, RIAs.
- Vertical portals : analysis and comparison
Here we study current online communities through their portal. Horizontal portal & mass information VS vertical portal & niches.
- General community needs
What are the common functional needs of all communities? Share? Discuss? Create?
What kind of technical specifications? Level of accessibility? Semantic? Customizability?
All this reflexion will point out a standardization of web portal concepts. This standardization is described in part 3; it contains both functional and technical specifications.
Each point of the specification comes from a reflexion in the research part but all the thoughts of my research part don't necessary create a new entry in the portal specifications.
All along the dissertation we keep focused on vertical features and communities. So you won't find here an exhaustive review on web 2.0 implications or latest web technical products.
The technical aim is to create an open library named PortalLib implementing concepts found during my background research.
PortalLib can be implemented easily in any kind of vertical portal. PortalLib is customizable, scalable, resource efficient and documented.
PortalLib version 1.0 (28/07/2007) provides:
PortalLib is based on Prado, a php component-driven framework.
The library contains descriptions of each component: why this component has been created and what is its usefulness.
The documentation explains also how to use and implement each component.
You can download PortalLib and his full documentation on http://www.portalLib.net
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