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Dissertation-Introduction

Page history last edited by Nicolas Cynober 16 years, 7 months ago

Back to dissertation.

 


1. Introduction


 

1.1. Rationale

 

1.1.1. Web as new mass media

 

Despite the most sceptics, everyone is aware that the web is becoming the first mass media. Nowadays young generations are growing up on internet and are using less and less old medias. Newspapers, radio and TV are now replaced by blogs, online radios and video portals like Youtube.  Economics and scientists compare the weaving of the web to the printing revolution [17]. A new era begins where costs to access and diffuse information are reduced to zero. In this completely new world everything has to be rethinking and recreated. The World Wide Web is only eighteen years old and like a teenager at this age, it's still growing and getting maturity.

And only nowadays people are realising how the web can be useful and fun, a place to learn, to entertain, to keep in touch with your network, your community.

 

1.1.2. Communities along the tail

 

Communities are everywhere and have always been targeted by old medias and advertisers. Since decades medias are focusing on the largest communities, creating programs for "teens", "women", "olders" but in fact people are belonging to thinner communities and groups. This concept has been raised by Chris Anderson in his book "The Long Tail", where he explains that the mass market is turning into a mass of niches. These niches have different sizes and different characteristics and most of them were not accessible because they were not profitable.

Internet makes possible to finally reach these emerging communities, but where are they located? In fact most of them don't have a portal to interact, exchange and create.

Here is the main objective of PortalLib, reducing costs, democratizing the tools of production and easing the creation of a vertical portal for a specific community.

 

1.1.3. New technologies

 

Functional innovations are often bound to technical ones. The web is young and its technologies are not mature as well. That is why a lot of companies are fighting to control web technologies.

Hopefully the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) controls this evolution, safeguarding fundamental values like accessibility and operability. The inventor of the web, Tim Berners Lee, has perfectly understood this critical issue and decided to found the W3C in order to accomplish his vision: a gigantic information marketplace, where individuals and organisations buy, sell and freely exchange information and information services among one other.

That is why my dissertation deals also with the future technical issues of vertical portals, following and sometimes discussing W3C recommendations.

 

1.2. Outline of the problem

 

1.2.1. Functional issues

 

The sentence "vertical portal for a community" points out two questions.

What is a vertical portal? What are the common needs of communities?

Along our reflexion we shall try to analyse users' behaviours and other portal tendencies.

It is very important to keep focused on what are the needs of the final customers when you are creating a library. In fact a library is a set of useful tools for webmasters and webmasters are always focusing on their users, so it is relevant that our library builds components resolving concrete needs.

This reflexion around communities covers many ways of studies, we'll take a look especially at the socials links (e.g. relationships between profiles), different mediums of expression (e.g. blogs), different medias used (e.g. text, audio, audio+video).

But we'll also work on portals functionalities, with talks around customization and widgets.

 

1.2.2. Technical issues

 

As I mentioned, following W3C technologies is an essential choice because it is the only way to guarantee operability and accessibility.

The main issue here is to find technological solutions to functional problems.

e.g. People are belonging to multiple communities and sub-communities, how to open social links with other networks and communities ?

A technical solution could be the implementation of FOAF (i.e. friend of a friend project using semantic with RDF) and OpenID (i.e. universal authentification).

Creating an open library also means that we have to take care of creating components well documented, working with other developers and integrating their feedback.

 

1.3. Objectives

 

1.3.1. Standardization of web portal concepts

 

Our researches and reflexions should raise various assumptions and concepts around vertical portals. The main idea here is to create a document which lists conclusions and advises on creation of vertical portals.

These concepts are functional or technical.

 

1.3.2. Open component library

 

The PortalLib project brings concrete solutions and tools in order to ease the creation of a vertical portal. All the components of the library respond to a specific concept.

Creating a library responding to all the concepts can be an overwhelming work so we have decided to implement the most valuable components first. Other components could be built after the dissertation delivery date. This project is created as open as possible so it shouldn't be a big deal.

All the specificities of the PortalLib project can be found at the following address: http://www.portalLib.net

 

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