This document, which is part of the Portal Solution Framework initiative, is a glossary of Portal Technology terms to be used to get

a common set of definitions. Glossary.doc V.1.1 02/03

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A
Access and Integration services

A portal solution will provide the architecture for tying into back-end databases and applications. The Access and Integration services layer provides this functionality to the portal, and even to individual Portlets. This layer may tie into an existing EAI solution to get access to certain back-end adapters or APIs. It will allow for the development of additional adapters for new systems as needed.

Access Controls

Access control systems enforce rules upon lists of identity to determine whether an identity, which is part of a role or a group, may have an appropriate level of access to perform an operation against a resource. The science of Computer Security is a combination of access control and cryptographic technologies. All portals use Access Controls.

Ad-Hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc reporting refers to the ability for an end user to create on-the-fly reports, usually accomplished through an intuitive graphical interface that constructs the underlying database queries.

Administration

Portal administration is the process of creating and managing users, groups, communities, and other portal settings. Administration is usually handled either through a password-protected web page or a standalone client application.Certain areas of the portal

provide their own administration, particularly when integratingwith third-party vendors for additional functionality.Typical portal administration functions include: * Adding users and groups to the system * Assigning users to groups * Assigning security to users and groups * Selecting content to be displayed and assigning the security around that content * Defining workflow * Registering modules, and assigning security to them * Scheduling jobsand processes * Defining and updating menus and navigation * Importing external data * Monitoring and defining message boards and any other collaborative functions * Community management

Aggregation

Process of building the portal page and all its portlets for presentation.

Alerts

An alert is a notification of an event or change based on one or more conditions involving single or multiple information or application sources. These notifications can be delivered within a portal as well as by other mechanisms such as e-mail or wireless device. Alerts usually accommodate individual user preferences, such as the delivery mechanism and format, the conditions that should trigger an alert, and the frequency of notification.

Announcements

Time-critical information. Can be sent to targeted groups. Members can choose whether to receive announcements via the portal or email.

API

Application Programming Interface (API). integration involves developers writing code to pull specific information or functionality from a system. APIs may be used either with the portal tool or with the external system. The most comprehensive form of API

integration would allow for both reading from and writing to the external system.

Application server

Application servers are the servers that provide the business logic for an application program. Some portal servers leverage the functionality of an application server to help provide infrastructure such as load balancing, redundancy, and fail-over services. Application servers are typically J2EE compliant and provide the underlying development and run-time infrastructure for the portal. Examples of application servers include iPlanet, BEA WebLogic, IBM Websphere, Oracle 9iAS and Sybase Application Server. Many of the application server vendors are incorporating portals as add-ons to their base product. For example, IBM Websphere Portal Server, Oracle Portal, BEA Portal and Sybase Enterprise Portal are all built on top of the corresponding application server and in some cases are sold as one package. Several of the stand-alone portal products, such as Plumtree, Epicentric and Corechange have Java components or are Java-based and take advantage of an application server.

Application services

Application services are those services that are obtained via a portal engine or a portal assistant through an API interface (sometimes called gadgets or portlets) or EAI layer. Application services include interfaces and integration to enterprise software packages such as SAP's and Oracle's ERP solution, Siebel's CRM solution, PeopleSoft's HR solution and i2's SCM solution. Application services also provide access to other legacy systems, content management, document management and collaboration.

Applications

Stated as part of the Enterprise Portal framework diagram.

Approval Workflow

Upon submission, workflow allows an approval process to be defined before the content is published to the portal. This workflow can be single-step, multi-step, and

can have parallel paths with Boolean logic. For example, submissions to a particular category must be approved by anyone in group A and then anyone in group B or C.

ASP

Application Service Provider - a provider of enterprise software and business applications via the Internet. A company that distributes software to customers across a network from a central computer. ASPs enable companies to outsource their IT needs

Authentication

Authorization

Authorization is the process of giving someone permission to do or have something. In multi-user computer systems, a system administrator defines which services are allowed access to the system and what privileges of use (such as access to file directories, hours of access, allocated storage space, etc.) users are granted.Authorization implies that authentication has been completed successfully. Authorization can be done at several levels.Users can be authorized, (as can groups or roles) for access to a resource (document, piece of content, etc.), a group of resources (document folder, content section, etc.), a web page, an activity, a section of the portal, or an application that can be accessed from the portal.

Availability

One of the goals of deployment technologies is availability. A system must meet its availability expectations. To ensure availability, a QA process is used by development. To further ensure availability, the application of redundant hardware and software has long been an established process.

B
B2B

Business to business( B2B) A business model that supports electronic transactions between businesses. * Extranet based * Provide partner tools, e-commerce, information * Secure Access required

B2C

Business to consumer (B2C). A business model that supports electronic commerce between a business and a consumer. * Internet based * Provide e-commerce, customer support applications * Open Access and/or Anonymous Users

B2E

Business to employee (B2E) A business model that supports electronic communications between a business and its employees. * Intranet based * Provide employee tools Desktop/Webtop * Secure Remote Access for Mobile/Remote Users

B2S

Business to Supplier relationship using an Enterprise portal

Best Practices

For a given company business there is always a best way of performing the work. Best practices are what the market dictate in order to be ahead of the competition. Sometimes also known as 'best of breed'.

BI

Business intelligence (BI) is comprised of applications and technologies used for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data that facilitate better enterprise decision making. Business intelligence applications can be: (1) Mission-critical to an enterprise's operations or used occasionally for special

requirements; (2) Enterprise-wide or local; and (3) Centrally initiated or driven by user demand.

Boolean-based Searches

Boolean-based search engines handle queries expressed in Boolean logic (including conjunctives like AND, OR, and NOT). Common search operators are spaces for OR, + for AND, - for NOT, and quotation marks for multiple-word strings. Boolean searches underlie the functionality of most search engines. Wildcards are usually accepted with Boolean tools, the most common of which are: * (any string of characters), ? (any single character).

Browse / Navigate Documents

This feature enables portal users to manually locate content by navigating the directory structure.

Bubble Help

Bubble help is text information displayed in a small balloon when the mouse cursor is moved over a UI element, such as the iconic items in a task bar or menu.

Business Intelligence

see BI

C
Cache

A buffer storage that contains copies of remote documents that are accessed by a portal; used to improve performance.

Caching

The caching of data gives your server the performance enhancement that comes from not having to regenerate a page or a set of data that has not changed since the

last time it was requested. Caching can be implemented at almost every level of a web-based solution. Database caching, application-server caching, web-server caching, and web-browser caching can all help increase performance and improve overall solution scalability.It further improves performance and response times by putting frequently accessed content closer to users in the IT infrastructure

Card

A WML document that provides the user-interface and navigational settings to display content on mobile devices.

Cascading Style Sheet

A W3C standard mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents.

Categorization Engine

A categorization engine is used for sorting documents into the folders of a taxonomy. The categorization engine may do this based on metadata in the documents, based on business rules, based on the content of the document, based on search criteria or filters, or some other scheme.

Category

A grouping of services.

Certificate

A cryptographic digital identity credential defined by the X.509 standard that can be used for authentication, digital signatures, secure exchange of encryption keys, etc.

Certificate Authorities

Certificate Authorities are arbitrators of proofs of digital identity. Certificate Authorities can generate certificates. While there are public CA's, such as Valicert and Verisign, companies are generating their own certificates. CA's are useful to Portals which provide high-value trade services or health care services, however, as they provide a third party mechanism for validating identity. Smaller portal applications may

generate their own certificates. The Digital Signature Act allows for Self-Certification. These Self-Certified certificates are legally valid for transactions.

Channels

Interactive applications integrated into the portal (eg. email, calendar, discussion, address book etc).

Chat

Chat is a functionality that allows two or more users to connect to a server and communicate in real time with each other.

Check-in / Check-out

Check-in and check-out refer to actions that protect a document from being unintentionally modified by more than one person at a time. Checking out a document involves downloading the document and prohibiting others from making changes while it's checked out. Checking in a document reverses the check-out process by uploading and unlocking it. Also important is version control, which is the management of the versions of a particular document.

CHTML

Compact hypertext markup language. A format for publishing hypertext information on wireless devices.

Client Layer

This typically consists of an operating system, a web browser, and an email/Groupware client (such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook.) Client layer software is often architected with a Presentation Layer, an Application Layer, and a Data Layer. In web applications, it may also include plug-in's, or Active/X controls, depending upon your browser.

Clustering

Clustering refers to the combination of replication and load balancing of servers

Collaboration

Collaboration is the ability for multiple people to share

ideas and work together across the portal. Portal collaboration functionality is limited to generalized collaboration and is commonly provided by a third party tool and integrated within the portal. This can be in the form of discussions, document sharing, or numerous others outlined below.The portal should also integrate with structured process-based collaborative enterprise applications.

Collaborative Filtering

Personalization technology that employs recommendation engines that use advanced statistical models and other forms of intelligent software to extract trends from the behavior of Web site visitors.

Community Management

Community management is defined as the ability to manage several communities, departments, or groups of portal users within the larger umbrella of the portal. In its simplest sense, this involves visual organization of portal content, often replicating multiple sub-community home pages while relying upon one underlying infrastructure and security system. In some portal products, community management is implemented in the form of multi-tabbed homepages, for which each tab contains its own security and access rights, globally defined at the portal level.

Community Support

Employees, customers and suppliers can collaborate online. Collaboration support is a key requirement for knowledge portals. It is also important in, for example, supply chain portals, in order to help suppliers and their customers manage their relationships. These capabailities include Chat, E-mail, shared calendars, threaded discussions, task tracking, version control, Web meetings and resource management. Some products provide the ability to tie into existing E-mail or workflow applications, while more sophisticated products may permit the creation of project or community spaces.

Content Categories / Taxonomy

This is the hierarchical framework for organizing and storing content. Categories may be associated with

security by users, groups and roles.

Content Creation

Content creation is the inputting of portal content, which may be in the form of text, HTML, and/or graphics.

Content Customization

Content customization means the ability to decide which portal elements are to be displayed on the portal home page, and the content within those elements.

Content Management

Content Management is the process of creating, submitting, accessing, approving, publishing and maintaining unstructured content from diverse sources. Portals should also effectively integrate structured content from enterprise applications to complement and give context to unstructured content.

Content Portal

Portal dedicated to Content management

Content Services

Content services deal with the management of unstructured digital assets within the portal. This typically includes a full text indexing engine, a set of crawlers that are capable of navigating and indexing existing content, a metadata repository, and a content management system to allow for the submittal and approval of content into the portal. This layer also includes a taxonomy manager.

Content Templates

Templates abstract the presentation layer from unstructured content, enhancing control. A portal usually supplies a pre-defined set of templates, often with a template editor that allows for defining new templates or editing existing ones. Templates may be organized in categories. Content templates based upon XML/XSL technology are emerging as an industry standard.

Content Translation

A content translation service automates the Service process of translating content from one language to another.

Context-Sensitive Help

Context-sensitive help is online assistance regarding the section, page, or action involving the user.

Crawler

A crawler is an automated process that reads, indexes and classifies documents at a pre-determined interval. A web crawler, for instance, would crawl target web pages periodically to determine if the content has changed. The content is then indexed into the taxonomy so that end users can easily find it. The crawler doesn't necessarily make another copy of the crawled document; rather it indexes it by creating a virtual card that describes the document. The card then lives in the portal index.

CRM

Customer Relationship Management is a business strategy to select and manage customers to optimize long-term value. CRM requires a customer-centric business philosophy and culture to support effective marketing, sales, and service processes. CRM applications can enable effective Customer Relationship Management, provided that an enterprise has the right leadership, strategy, and culture.

Cross repository searching

Enables users to enter at one entry point and perform searches across disparate repositiories, e.g. Lotus Notes database, Microsoft Exchange public folders, Web sites, File systems, databases and a collection of other repositories.

Cryptography

The science of Cryptography provides for a mathematically rigorous means of authentication, encryption, and non-repudiation. Highly secure portals all implement cryptography for all of these capabilities.

Currency Support

Currency support refers to the portal's ability to recognize and display multiple currencies.

Currency Translation Service

A currency translation service provides automatic conversion from one currency to another, which often requires a dynamic currency conversion table.

Customization

The user's ability to change the layout, look-and-feel, and content of the portal.

D
Dashboard

A number of controls provided to the user for navigating through a specific process.

Data Mining

Data mining is the analysis of data to discover meaningful relationships. For example, the sales records for a particular product, such as a tennis racket, might, if sufficiently analyzed and related to other market data, reveal a seasonal correlation with the purchase of another product, such as golf equipment. Data warehousing is gaining acceptance in part because of the possibility of fruitful data mining.

Data Warehousing

A data warehouse is a central repository for all or a significant portion of the data collected by an enterprise's business systems. Data from online transaction processing (OLTP) applications and other sources are selectively extracted and organized in the data warehouse's database for use by analytical applications and user queries. Data warehousing helps capture data from diverse sources for analysis and access, but generally is not designed for typical users or

knowledge workers, who may need access to specialized databases. Specialized data warehouses that address the needs of end users are known as data marts.

Database

Most portals have an underlying database (such as Oracle, DB2, Sybase, or SQL Server) that they use to keep track of information specific to the portal - such as users, personalization settings, available web services/Portlets and security. This use of the database is in addition to a transactional system's database (e.g. ERP, CRM or SCM system) that a portal might query to present application specific data to end users.

Database servers

A database is a collection of data that is organized so that its contents can easily be accessed, managed, and updated. The most prevalent type of database is the relational database, a tabular database in which data is defined so that it can be reorganized and accessed in numerous ways. In some cases, portal servers require a particular database for the core application, but will otherwise read data from any database. Some examples of popular databases include Oracle, Informix, Sybase, SQL Server, and DB2.

Decision Point

DecisionPoint is an enterprise information management solution that uses portal technology to enhance collaboration and provide a corporation's employees with personalized access to validated information.

Decision Support System (DSS)

A decision support system (DSS) is an application that analyzes business data and presents it to facilitate smarter business decisions. DSS may present information graphically and may include an expert system or artificial intelligence (AI). It may be aimed at business executives or some other group of knowledge workers.

Deck

An XML document that contains a collection of WML

cards. See cards.

Development Environment

Development environments include tools that allow developers to build or extend the portal. As most portals lack integrated development environments (IDE) or GUIs for module development, any tools, like APIs or SDKs, that provide a developer with the ability to develop with ease are included.

Digital Certificates

A digital certificate is an electronic credit card that establishes the user credentials when doing business or other transactions on the Web. A digital certificate is issued by a certification authority (CA), and usually contains the following information: (1) name; (2) serial number; (3) expiration dates; (4) a copy of the certificate holder's public key; and (5) the digital signature of the certificate-issuing authority. Digital certificate-based security solutions are typically vendor-based and are designed to work in a scalable manner across the Internet.

Digital Signature

A digital signature is an electronic stamp that is used to authenticate the identity of the sender of a message or the signer of a document, and possibly to ensure that the original content of the message or document is unchanged. Digital signatures cannot be forged by someone else, and can be automatically time-stamped. The ability to ensure that an original signed message has arrived also means that the sender cannot easily repudiate it later.

Directory

The portal's directory is its organization of content into a structure and hierarchy of categories. The directory is the implementation within the portal of the enterprise's taxonomy.

Discussion Boards

Discussion, message or bulletin boards are staples of web collaboration. In their simplest forms, these boards enable users to post, view and respond to messages. In

more complex instances, discussion boards enable users to attach documents to messages, search all posted messages, conduct multithreaded discussions, flexibly customize the organization of messages (e.g., along chronological or topical lines). Multithreaded discussion boards are particularly useful as they track multiple responses to original messages, making it easy for the reader to follow an entire discussion thread.

DMZ

A DMZ - De-Militarised Zone, is a separate part of an organization's network which is shielded and 'cut off ' from the main corporate network and its systems. The DMZ contains technical equipment (firewalls, etc.) to prevent access from external parties (e.g on the Internet) from gaining access to the main systems.

Document Categories / Taxonomy

Taxonomy is a hierarchical organizational system of categories or metadata for storing or indexing documents. These categories are usually assigned levels of security with regard to the rights of users, groups, and roles to view or edit documents.

Document Management

Document management is similar to content management, although it typically refers to the control and management of an enterprise's documents (other than web pages) stored in electronic files, including scanned images of paper documents. It also often includes check in and check out of documents to ensure version control.

Document Profiling / Metadata

Document profiling refers to associating descriptive information (metadata) with documents. Metadata can include the date submitted, date to expire, date to publish, author, keywords, description, and so on.

Document Scanning

Document scanning transforms non-electronic files into electronic formats displayable in the portal. Advanced document scanning functionality manages and transfers (to storage) large amounts of hard-copy submissions.

Document Security

Document security means the association (by specific document or by document category) of read/write security for specified users, groups and roles.

Document Sharing

Document sharing is the ability for people to use the web to collaborate on documents. A recently emerging technology in this area is a standard called WebDAV, which is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allows users to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote web servers.

DTD and XSD

Document Type Definition and XML Schema Definition. Both DTD and XSD are ways to define the structure and layout of XML documents. DTD and XSD become important for validating that an XML document is in the right format for passing information between different systems, or for passing information from a back-end system to the portal.

E
EAI

Enterprise Architecture Infrastructure used to provide a common interface to all databases.

Ease of Upgrade

The level of difficulty involved in upgrading a portal product to a new version.

e-Commerce

Business conducted over the internet and computer to computer.

EIP

Enterprise Information Portals (EIP) These are portals

that are designed for B2E processes, activities and communities to improve the access, processing and sharing of structured and unstructured information within and across the enterprise. EIPs also incorporate roles, processes, workflow, collaboration, content management, data warehousing and marts, enterprise applications and business intelligence. EIPs provide employee access to other types of portals such as eBusiness portals, personal portals and public portals. EIPs also provide access to syndicated content which is defined as external information, from a single or multiple sources, that is maintained by a third-party (e.g., news feeds). Shilakes & Tyleman, Merrill Lynch, Inc. define Enterprise Information Portals as applications that enable companies to UNLOCK internally stored information, and provide users with a single gateway to PERSONALIZED information and knowledge to make informed business DECISIONS

EJB

Enterprise Java beans (EJB) A re-usable lump of Java. In object oriented terms, it could be referred to a as an object.

Electronic Whiteboarding

Information can be shared between parties on an electronic whiteboard.

End User Customization

Customization refers to the capability of portals to allow users to specify their own preferences for the user interface look-and-feel attributes. Customization typically accommodates preferences for color schemes, modules that appear, and the layout of the modules and content on a page of the portal.

Enrollment

The process of entering and saving user or user group information in a portal.

Enterprise Application Integration

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) serves as the umbrella term for all software and services meant to integrate enterprise applications with one another. EAI

impacts the portal because the portal ideally will show consolidated information from multiple back end systems. An EAI layer is needed so that the queries can be coordinated and the results consolidated.

EP

Enterprise portal

ERP

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) A business management system that integrates all facets of business, including planning, manufacturing, sales and marketing. As the ERP methodology has become more popular, software applications have emerged to help business managers implement ERP.

ETL

Extract, Transform and Load data (ETL).

ETM

Enterprise Travel Management (ETM) . The main objectives of ETM solution are to reduce and control Travel cost . A use of a self booking tool offer new opportunities for cost savings by providing powerful negotiating data, streamlining business processes, enabling travel e-procurement, and enforcing travel policies to achieve up-front savings.

Expert Locator

In addition to helping users locate information that is important to them, a portal can be very useful in finding experts within the organization. This extends the concept of corporate knowledge to include people and their skill sets. In some cases, these skill sets are implicit in their job functions and the types of information they regularly handle. In other cases, these skill sets are explicit.

Explicit personalization

Explicit personalization is delivered based on information the user or system has provided (for example a user's profile), or on attributes associated with the user. With this form of personalization, there is a heavy reliance on predefined users and groups, and a

system in place to maintain and manage these roles.

F
Failover

Failover refers to the automatic detection of an unresponsive or overloaded server and the subsequent re-direction of requests to another server.

Federated portals

Whether there are different departmental portals in place or portals focused on different audiences (B2B, B2C, and B2E portals), the need for integration of portal products is growing. Most enterprise portal solutions today are based on an architecture that either collects all enterprise data and stores it in a data warehouse, or connects to all data sources using a single enterprise portal server. Portals designed around either of these approaches can be accurately described as data center enterprise portals. Problems with data center portals include business issues such as planning, ownership, and budgeting, and technology issues such as scalability and growth. An alternative to a data center portal is a portal based on the distributed computing model. A distributed architecture for an enterprise portal involves a network of connected, departmentsizedportal servers working together as a group of federated portals. The word federated implies a union of independent entities working together to provide specific functions.

Firewall

Firewalls are computers that run software that analyzes and filters network packets and makes security decisions based upon them.

Foundations

Part of Enterprise Portal framework including

Infrastructure, Directory, Security and Metrics.

Full-Text Searches

Full-text searching involves indexing all words within a document, allowing users to search for documents based upon their content.

G
Gadget

see portlet. This is terminology used by Plumtree a portal vendor.

General Help

General help is a high-level overview and online assistance. This may include and be categorized and organized around functional assistance for all portal features.

Graphic Design

Graphic design (or visual design) refers to the images, colors, font types, font sizes, layout, and overall graphical effect of the site.

Groups

Groups are organized collections of identities. They are configured by administrative personnel and maintained on a day-to-day basis. Portals always need to manage groups as an economic convenience to manage the privacy, integrity, and appropriate accessibility of the data.

H
Help

Help is the process of providing user assistance in a contextual, general or interactive manner.

Home Page

The starting point from where the user navigates the portal.

Horizontal portal

Horizontal portals are interest group or community specific providing a business-to-consumer e-commerce web site which allows large numbers of community based consumers to transact electronically with a limited number of suppliers. These suppliers generally supply goods specific to the interest or community group. The buyers may be general consumers, or SME style enterprises, using the buying power of the community to attain a lower cost.

Hosting Service Providers

Hosting service providers operate and maintain the portal services. These can be internal to an organization, such as an IT department, or even external to an organization, such as an Application Service Provider, (ASP) or an off-site hosting services vendor. The typical tasks that a hosting service provider performs are Systems Management and Site Administration.

HTML

Hypertext markup language. HTML is the language of markup symbols that define pages viewed through a Web browser. It is the standard language for static web page development.

HTTP

Hypertext transport protocol. Protocol of the WWW.

HTTPS

Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTPS) is a web

protocol that encrypts and decrypts user page requests as well as the pages that are returned by the Web server. HTTPS uses SSL as a sub-layer under the regular HTTP protocol. Unless otherwise specified, nearly every portal product can run in an environment that uses SSL and HTTPS.

I
IDE

An integrated development environment (IDE) is a GUIbased application that allows the developer to create new functionality or enhance existing areas of the portal while minimizing code writing.An IDE can generally be used for management and enhancement of the presentation, business logic, content and data of the portal.

Identity Management

The identify services deal with security issues at the level of the portal and at a cross-application level. This includes authentication services (username/password management, LDAP synchronization, single sign-on, groups, etc.). This also consists of authorization services, which map the roles, privileges of end users to individual security policies and to domains of content within the portal. While the infrastructure for managing authorizations is provided at this level, end users typically set up the security for individual Portlets or Content Folders via the Administration/Management services and/or the Content Services. In a wellintegrated Portal architecture, the front end provided by those layers (Administration and Content) would communicate with an underlying, independent set of security services.

Immediate Messaging Systems

Chat is a functionality that allows two or more users to connect to a server and communicate in real-time with

each other.

i-mode

An Internet service for wireless devices.

Implicit personalization

Implicit personalization (also referred to as heuristic) is delivered based on the user's online behavior (for example, delivering certain content because a user has clicked certain links or visited certain pages). This form of personalization is sometimes called event-based personalization and is much more difficult to implement. It is still rare within portal tools and often requires programming.

Index

An index is a collection of information that allows for fast query and retrieval. Within the context of a portal, an Index is usually a combination of a full-text index and a meta-data repository for the documents/content that is included within the portal.

Indexing

Indexing is the process of creating a quickly searchable catalog of information derived from or describing the data being searched.

Information Architecture

Information architecture refers to the site map, informational groupings, navigation, nomenclature (terminology), information layout, and the layout of individual portal elements on pages. Information Architecture determines the features, functionality, and flow of information for a site.

Information Services

A portal is an aggregation of one or more Information services. An Information service can be thought of as meaningful information - which might come from a structured data source, unstructured content sources inside the corporation, or external information available on public or private web sites. The information may be coming from third-party sources in the form of a web service (e.g. syndicated content), or might be provided

in the form of documents. End users can then subscribe to one or more information service on a personalized basis as part of their portal customization.

Infrastructure

Refer to 'Infrastructure Services'.

Infrastructure services

A robust portal framework includes multiple levels of infrastructure services that provide a comprehensive unification and integration platform. This includes the services related to load balancing, caching, high availability and performance that are provided by the web server environment, as well as the underlying security infrastructure. The security infrastructure at this layer consists of secure access related issues (firewalls, VPN's, etc.). Also included are LDAP synchronization, unified authentication, single cross-platform login and authorization services of the portal.

Instant Messaging

Instant messaging (IM) has become popular because of applications like ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger. IM works like chat from the user\s perspective, but requires no server software to connect users and sometimes supports file transfers.

Instructional Help

Instructional help provides informative text regarding portal functions that state purpose and usage.

Interactive Help

Natural language based search facility provides assistance based on the user's request or query.

Interactive Querying

Interactive querying provides a user with the ability select a pre-built report, provide input parameters, and view sections, records, or the entire report on wireless devices. Examples of this include inventory lookup and employee directory querying.

Internationalization

Refers to a portal's ability to be extended to support multiple countries, generally addressing multiple languages and currency requirements.

Internet searches / Web Searches

A retrieval engine that reaches into the Worldwide Web can be an addition to an enterprise portal. External searches crawl the Internet for relevant information. There are several search-engine products available for consumer use, including Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, and Google.

Interoperability

The ability of software and hardware on different machines from different vendors to share data. Interoperability is critical to a portal. A typical portal integrates several web applications, (which can be of multiple architectures, i.e., Microsoft and Sun architectures,) different applications, (i.e., XML Applications and Database Applications,) with traditional desktop applications, (such as word processors and spreadsheets.) Through the use of portal technologies, many of these components, and more, can be consolidated into a single, organized desktop.

Intranet

Internet connections used within a corporation.

Intrusion Detection

Intrusion Detection software analyzes patterns of activity within a network to determine if it is under attack.

J
J2EE

The Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) is a Java platform designed for the distributed computing

needs of large enterprises. Sun Microsystems and industry partners designed J2EE to simplify application development in a thin client-tiered environment. J2EE allows the creation of standardized, re-usable modular components and enables the tier to automatically handle many programming aspects.

Java

A programming language created by Sun Microsystems to support both Web based and thin client computing. It is object oriented and platform independent.

Java applet

A piece of Java that performs a function that runs on the users device.

Java bean

Refer to EJB

Java servlet

A piece of Java that performs a function that runs on the server. Usually made up of Java beans.

Javascript

Scripting language used for enhancing Web pages. Syntaxically similar to Java. But like all web scripting languages it needs to be embedded within the web page code.

Javaswing

An extension to the Java development kit that enables Java developers to produce applications with a graphical user interface.

JDBC

Java Database Connectivity Both a standard and software which enables Java software to access popular databases, without the developer needing to know much about the underlying network and database issues.

JDK

Java Development Kit. This is a set of standards defined by Sun Microsystems, which defines the Java standard.

JSP

Java Server Page. Sun Microsystems answer to Microsofts ASP. Essentially it enables web pages to be built using data accessed from a database.

JSR168

Java Portlet Specification Java Specification Requests (JSRs) are the actual descriptions of proposed and final specifications for the Java platform developed through the JCP (Java Community Process). JSR168 is the Portlet specification that would enable interoperability between Portlets and Portals. This specification will define a set of APIs for portal computing addressing the areas of aggregation, personalization, presentation and security. The current goals of JSR168 are to: * Define common Portal metaphor * Define a standard Portlet Java API * Ensure interoperability and portability * Enable multiple markups support * Maximize the leverage of existing Java APIs * Ensure compatibility with other technologies

JST

JST is a concurrent object-oriented language extension for the Java(TM) language. It provides a mechanism for programmers who are developing synchronization code for multi-threaded objects. JST separates the synchronization code from the rest of the program. JST uses a state/transition based syntax.

JVM

Java Virtual Machine. An essential piece of software that enables Java to run on a computer.

K
Knowledge Management

The management of knowledge within an organization. Particularly significant in organisations where the companys principal asset is the knowledge of their people.

L
Language Support

Language support identifies the specific languages into which the text aspects of the portal have already been translated. This can either be handled through separate versions of the portal product, or through language selections within the product.

LDAP

The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. A common directory structure accepted through most of the industry. Portals use these to maintain user information, organizational information, as well as access control and cryptographic certificate information.

Legacy Screen Scraping

Legacy screen scraping refers to the process of replicating legacy-based application screens within a web-based environment.

Load Balancing

Load balancing means evenly distributing the demand for a service across all the servers that provide the service.

Logon

Logon passwords are the most common form of

authentication. Knowledge of the password is assumed to guarantee user authenticity. Each user registers (registered by someone else), using an assigned or self-declared password. On each subsequent use, the user must know and use the previously declared common to authenticate a user's logon information against user credentials from the following repositories: * A Relational Database (e.g., Oracle, SQL Server, DB2) * An LDAP store (e.g., Netscape Directory Server,Microsoft Active Directory, Novell NDS), and Operating System (e.g., Windows NT Domain)

LTPA

Lightweight Third Party Authentication. An authentication framework that allows single signon across a set of Web servers that fall within an Internet domain.

M
Members

Those who have authority to log on to the portal.

Messaging

Messaging provides the directory and facilities required to send wireless messages to other users of the portal.

Metadata

Metadata is information describing unstructured content, such as title, author, date submitted, date created, effective dates, and other keywords. Metadata aids in indexing, searching, and upgrading. Minimal metadata that should be captured include keywords, description, category, and title.

Metadata repository

A metadata repository contains metadata about the

content within the portal and about the structure of that content. This includes the metadata about the taxonomy, as well as the metadata for the individual documents. For example, each of the documents placed in a folder called Clients might have a metadata field called Client which would have one or more values. The value of the Client field for a particular document is metadata about that document.

Metrics

For portals there are business and system metrics maintained.

Multi-system integration

Many portals exist primarily to provide access to applications: the value of portals relies on their ability to combine and integrate information from disparate sources. White Paper

N
Natural-language Search

Natural-language searches allow the user to make search queries in plain English (often as questions), as opposed to through keywords or Boolean expressions. These tools require pre-built repositories of look-up information that serve as translators for requests and typically rely on a Boolean-based search engine after the real word request has been translated.

Navigation

In order to move from function to function within a portal screen certain techniques are used i.e. navigation.

NewsML

News markup language (NewsML) An XML-based format for publishing news-related information.

NITF

News industry text format (NITF) An XML-based format that defines the structure and content of news articles.

Non-Repudiation

The act of proving that the data has not been tampered with. It is done through the use of public key technologies and cryptographic hash functions.

O
OCS channels

Open content syndication channels (OCS) An XMLbased format for syndicated content.

Online Editing/ Collaboration

Online editing is the ability to edit an existing document in a browser and save it to the document repository. This feature is closely related to document collaboration.

Online Wizard

Online wizards are step-by-step walkthroughs that guides the user through a process or activity.

Open Standards

A philosophy which promotes standards as a way of empowering users to avoid vendor lock-in. The standards promote portability of software between hardware platforms and the communication between software resident on the same or different hardware platforms. Whilst this is a just cause, you need more than standards to crunch data.

Operating systems

The operating system (OS) is the software that manages applications and allows those applications to make requests for system resources and services.

WindowsNT, Windows 2000, Linux, and the many flavors of Unix are all operating systems that a portal should support. Typically, only Java-based portal servers currently offer that full breadth of support.

Organization

Organization refers to the location of portal elements on the user's main page.

P
PDA

Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) A small handheld computer that provides organizational features.

Performance

Performance is critical to any portal. A portal that does not perform will not be seen as adding value to a user community. Performance management consists of two types of tasks, those that occur at run time, and those that occur in the long-term.

Personalization

The process of tailoring the portal to individual users' characteristics, preferences or roles based on business rules and user profile information. Portal personalization can occur at multiple levels. Each individual user can have settings for each of the portal functions that they use. A community, or group of users, can have settings and settings can be established up to the organizational level. A portal provides the framework for users to store the settings and tailor the content that they are interested in seeing.

Pervasive computing

The use of a computing infrastructure rom which users can access a broad range of network-based services, including Internet-based e-commerce services.

Pervasive computing provides users with the ability to access and take action on information conveniently.

PKI

A public key infrastructure (PKI) enables users of an unsecured public network, such as the Internet, to securely and privately exchange data and money through the use of a public and a private cryptographic key pair that is obtained and shared through a trusted authority. The public key infrastructure provides for a digital certificate that can identify an individual, and, when necessary, revoke the certificates. Although the components of a PKI are generally understood, a number of different vendors have different approaches and new standards are emerging. A single Internet standard for PKI is in the works.

Platform

Platform refers to the operating systems and underlying infrastructure software such as databases, application servers, and web servers that the portal supports. The greater the number of operating systems and types of infrastructure software the portal supports, the more flexible it is.

Policy

The security policy outlines the business needs for security and the organizational procedures for meeting these business needs. Such a policy is used to define access control and certificate policies.

Portal

A personalised and customisable interface that provides a single, secured , access point to online services, information, applications and people. The promise of a portal is to provide the following: * personalized access (you define what you want), * role-based filtering of content (you only get what you need), * user-friendly interaction (you understand what you see), * multi-system integration (you get directly to the systems you use to do your work), * scalability (you experience good online response time with lowest possible hardware investment),

* single sign-on (you need only one password for all systems you use), * content management (you find the documents and knowledge you need to be effective), * security (your systems and content are accessed only by those who are supposed to access them) * community support (your employees, customers and suppliers can collaborate online), * a general development framework (a technology tool kit that ties together all types of business software you use).

Portal Banner

Top part of the Home page

Portal Features

Features are the portal components that address individual business needs

Portal Menu Bar

This is used within a portal like a a Web based application to navigate between tabs.

Portal Operations

This is the domain of the portal administrators, both business and technical.

Portal Presentation

This is the domain of one of more functional business units. Portals tie together and present all aspects of an organization, and typically carry the organization's branding.

Portal Services

As part of the Enterprise portal framework portakl services include Employee to content, Employee to Communities, Employee to Enterprise and Employee to Business Data. (refer to separate items in Glossary).

Portlet

A Portlet can be thought of as a building block of a portal. It is a user-interface for presenting data and functionality from multiple applications on a single web

page. Portlets encompass the presentation layer and the business logic. They also tie into the back end data sources. Called different names by different vendors (Portlets, Gadgets, Blocks, Web Modules, Web Parts), many portal vendors have portlets for connecting to enterprise systems (such as SAP, Siebel, etc.) as well as for collaboration, news, and other functions.

Presentation Server

The presentation server typically supports the user interface operations of a portal. This is typically a web server, such as Apache, Microsoft IIS, or NetScape iPlanet. (Other web servers exist, but these are the top three.) Presentation servers tend to support web-based applications.

Presentation Services

This layer of a portal framework deals with the presentation of the portal content / portlets to the end users and serves as the web interface. The main browser window may be segmented into frames for each personalized application or a new browser window can be launched when a new application is initiated. This is typically done in HTML, but it might also be done in WML (for wireless devices) or some other format in the future. Because a portal is a collection of different panes (also referred to as portlets, or web services), the question of where the presentation work gets done may or may not be straightforward. In many portals, each portlet generates the HTML necessary for that portlet, and then the portal server aggregates these portlets into a final HTML presentation. In other portals, each portlet is really a Web Service, which returns XML and returns an XSLT, which the portal then transforms to the final presentation format.

Public Key

A public key is a value provided by a designated authority that, combined with a private key derived from that public key, can be used to encrypt messages and digital signatures.

Push

Push technology when embedded in portals is an ideal way to easily full business value transmitting information

to users through a standardized web-based interface e.g. alerts.

R
Realm

A realm is a collection of resources that share a common security requirement. In other words, a realm is a 'view' that has the same authentication requirements. Realms can be hierarchical.

Real-time

Operations that are seen on line.

Related Language Tables

A related language table stores language codes, (Localization Tables) and the translated values in all supported languages to achieve ease of translation. All words are captured and tagged appropriately with metadata so that they can be searched and replaced easily and correctly without the underlying system being affected.

Replication

Replication refers to dedicating additional hardware and/or software to a given activity in order to provide greater processing capability. This often implies mirrored servers, or the process of copying information from remote sources onto local disk stores, or caches.

Report Generation

Report generation takes existing data and distributes them to appropriate users and groups in a user-friendly format.

Results Ranking

Often a ranking system or algorithm is employed to

display search results. Most algorithms assign priority to results and display results in descending order. Criteria frequently included in the algorithm are closeness of match to keywords, title, date submitted, hit density, location of key words within content, semantics (possible meanings), contextual information, and proximity of keywords to each other.

ROI

Return On Investment.A calculation of how much money will be saved or earned as the result of an investment in a Portal Solution. ROI Calculations should be used in developing a business case for a given proposal; be sure to factor in investments of both time and capital. Typically in Portal implementations, streamlining business processes commonly returns ROI, however for each implementation of a portal the detailed ROI can be calculated.

Role-based filtering of content

To get only what one needs. Search including directory, document, Internet and report searches.

Roles

Roles are organized collections of capabilities. The collections of capabilities tend to be maintained by developers. Roles may have groups and/or users as members who have access to the capabilities defined by the developers. The memberships of the roles tend to be maintained by administrators.

RSS

Rich site summary. An XML-based format for syndicated content.

SAML

Secure Access Markup Language (SAML) Inspired by Netegrity, this language has been developed to facilitate a Delegated Management strategy. It contains nonreputable transactions for managing access controls. It is expected that software vendors will embrace SAML to facilitate their own SSO (soon to be known as Delegate Management) strategies. Portals will reduce their costs in the mid-term by adopting SAML, as their integration with other security paradigms will be simpler.

Scalability

Within the context of web-based solutions, such as enterprise portals, the term scalability has two meanings.First, it refers to the ability of a computer application or product (hardware or software) to continue to function well as its context changes in size or volume. Usually, this re-scaling is to a larger size or volume of users. The scalability of a product can refer to its ability to run on an expanded system (such as a larger or more varied line of computer systems with various resources and capacities in terms of storage, RAM, etc.).Additionally, scale can refer to its ability to move to a new context (such as a new operating system). Second, scalability refers to the ability to actually take full advantage of the new situation. For example, an application would be scalable if it could be moved from a smaller to a larger operating system and take full advantage of the larger operating system in terms of performance (user response time and so forth) and capacity (the larger number of users that could be handled).

SCM

Supply Chain Management. The process by which suppliers and their suppliers cooperate to maximize supply efficiencies. Increasingly heard in relation to enterprise applications and e-procurement.

SDK

A software developer's kit (SDK) is a set of programs used by a computer programmer to write application programs. Typically, an SDK includes a visual screen builder, an editor, a compiler, a linker, and other technology-specific facilities.

Search

A fundamental part of a portal implementation is its search capability, which indexes enterprise content from multiple storage systems and allows users to browse and retrieve content based on selection criteria. Searching across multiple portals and their integrated applications is referred to as federated or network search. In this case the user can specify the search criteria once, but retrieve relevant content links from the diverse repositories targeted by the search.

Security

Security within the context of enterprise portals is not very different from security within the context of any web-based enterprise application. Security ensures that the proper people have access to the proper information, applications or services. It is on 2 levels: * data transfer at the transport layer level (mainly by relying on the SSL service), * data access with entitlement and authorizing, according to user profile and rigth policy (based on data type and data use definition).

Service Level Agreement

Service Level Agreements define the proper levels of service to provide systems' customers with. It is typically a list of performance and availability specifications, given a certain workload.

Services

Web applications and online information available through the portal.

Servlet

see java servlet.

Single Sign-On

Single sign-on refers to the ability of a user to log on once to the enterprise portal and be automatically authenticated to all components and applications to which they have access. In its purest form, single signon relies on a centralized authentication point (e.g., LDAP, operating system, etc.), but it can also be accomplished through the use of digital certificates or even client-side cookies. Today's leading Single Sign-

on software packages primarily rely on a common web server or group of servers for a single-point of authentication. Typically the single sign-on applications can only authenticate against web applications.

SOAP

(Simple Object Access Protocol) SOAP is an XMLbased lightweight protocol for the exchange of information in a de-centralized, distributed environment. SOAP defines a messaging protocol between requestor and provider objects, such that the requesting objects can perform a remote method invocation on the providing objects in an object-oriented programming fashion.

Soft benefits

Benefits that cannot be easily substantiated e.g. goodwill.

Spider / Crawler / Bot

Also known as crawlers or bots, spiders are programs that visit Web sites and scan them to create entries for search-engine indices. Spiders are typically programmed to visit new or updated sites. Entire sites or specific pages can be visited and indexed. Spiders usually visit many sites in parallel, their legs spanning a large area of the web. While spiders can scan a site's pages in several ways, they most commonly follow all hypertext links in each page until all pages have been read.

SSL

Secure Sockets Layer Protocol. SSL is a security protocol which establishes a secure communication session using public key cryptography, and a mutually agreed upon symmetrical session key to encrypt and decrypt messages for the remainder of the session. This leverages the advantages of both symmetrical and asymmetrical methods. SSL was developed by the Netscape Corporation to address the need to make HTTP- based transactions more secure. This is an encryption protocol used between clients and servers. This protocol is used in conjunction with keys that are used to encrypt and decrypt data.

SSO

Refer to Single Sign-on.

Standards

While standards have traditionally been more of an information technology ideal, with little proof of business benefit, standards compliance, more and more, is becoming an important requirement for enterprise portal products. A reliance on open, accepted interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) has many inherent advantages over use of closed, proprietary solutions. As portals rely heavily on integrating disparate internal and external systems, the more fully a portal complies with standards, the easier it will be to integrate such systems.

Structured data

As opposed to Unstructured data. Data that can be described & classified through indexes, records or meta-tags. Uisually refers to data with simple structures stored in a database.

Subscribe / What's new

Many portals (and other web sites and applications) allow individuals to register an interest in or subscribe to a particular component or category of content. Portals will then notify the subscribers when the content changes or new content is added.

Subscription-based Content Push

Content push allows users to subscribe to sections, communities, or channels with published portal content and pushes that content to users' wireless devices.

Subscriptions / Notifications / Alerts

These allow portal users to specify content categories, channels or sections to which they wish to be notified when new content is published. Alerts may be in the form of email, wireless messages, or messages on the user's portal page.

Support for Local Regulations Laws

The ability to filter and transform information to and support the privacy regulations and policies that vary from country to country.

Synchronous

Transactions taking place simultaneously.

Syndicated Content

Syndicated content is external information that is written and maintained by a third party. The best example is a news feed to the portal that is provided by an external news organization.

T
TAB

Tabs are used when navigating a portal.

Target Groups

Group attributes (eg. department, programme etc.) to enable targeted communication, allocation of services and to control access rights. This information is derived from the Schools administrative database (LBSdb).

Targeted Publishing / Content Security

This provides security and control around the content or groups of content. This includes the ability to expire content or post the content in the future. Targeted publishing also includes the ability to specify access to content by users, groups, or roles.

Taxonomy

Taxonomy is the content directory for an enterprise's unstructured information and it can be populated with content and presented to the user in many different ways. Both substance and behavior of the directory define a usable Taxonomy for an enterprise.Indented lists, classification trees and hierarchies are other terms used to describe Taxonomy structures. Folders and sub-folders, topics and sub-topics, categories and subcategories are others. It gives us a way to organize content into a structure that is easily browsed by the portal user.

Taxonomy Manager

Provides a mechansism to organize content into a structure that is easily browsed by the portal user. It may achieve this based on a number of criteria, e.g. metadata in the documents, business rules, and content of the document, on search criteria, filters or some other scheme.

Threaded discussions

Provides a mechansism to organize content into a structure that is easily browsed by the portal user. It may achieve this based on a number of criteria, e.g. metadata in the documents, business rules, and content of the document, on search criteria, filters or some other scheme.

U
UDDI

Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration, a registry of information (service brooker) about business entities and the web services they make available. The UDDI specification enables businesses to quickly, easily, and dynamically find and transact with one another. UDDI enables a business to * describe its business and its services, * discover other businesses that offer desired services, and * integrate with these other businesses.

Unstructured data

Data that has no organization.

URI

Uniform Resource Identifier. (URI) The method used to identify the locations of content on the Internet. The URL (uniform resource locator) is a particular form of a URI that identifies a Web page address. A URI typically describes (a) the mechanism used to access the

resource (for example, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP), (b) the specific computer where the resource is stored (for example, www.webserver.org), (c) and the specific name of the resource on the computer (for example /products/images/serv.jpg).

URL-Based Integration

This form of integration is the most basic - the portal provides a URL to an existing web page, and the exact output of that URL will be displayed in either a new browser window or that of the portal. If it is included in the portal window, it is usually not in a module, but in a frame that takes up the entire screen. This may or may not include authentication information.

User friendly interaction

To understand what one sees. Portals should offer easy-to-navigate interfaces that can be designed to match the 'look and feel' of a business 's existing applications. Behind the scenes, these interfaces should serve as the gateway for security and access control by the System Administrator and for services such as searching. Portal interfaces can vary greatly in the amount of customization and flexibility they allow.

User interface

The end user interface encompasses all aspects of end user interaction with the portal, thus creating their experience. The user interface can also be called the front end, presentation layer, or GUI (Graphical User Interface). Usually, a user may select from an assortment of edefined themes.

User Management

User management refers to the administrative functions of managing system user accounts, including adding or deleting users, as well as managing access privileges and groups that to which the user belongs.Access privileges are commonly stored in Access Control Lists (ACLs). Delegated administration, and user and portal management allow for a hierarchy of administrators managing different levels and sections of the portal.

User Profiles

Each Portal contains a profile for each of its users. This profile is used for customization and personalization. Each of the Portlets in a portal has access to this user profile and can use it to store preference information about a user or a class of users. This profile is also how the user configures the home page of a portal and chooses which Portlets show up and what information they should show.

V
Vertical portal

Vertical portals are industry specific providing a business-to-business web site which allows large numbers of industry based buyers and suppliers to transact electronically and securely in an open market environment. Focused content is key to making a successful vertical portal. A vertical portal generally makes available to its members relevant industry information and content specific to their jobs, industry, etc.

Video Conferencing

Video conferencing solutions offer applications, tools, and hardware for transmitting voice and audio to allow for live video conference calls. Not included in current portal products, access to video conferencing services can be integrated.

Views

Configuration of default desktop and services to suit target community.

Virtual Card

Within an index or metadata repository, a virtual card is a description of a single document or piece of content within the portal. The card usually contains information about where the content physically resides, and

contains the values of one or more metadata fields about that document. The card is the placeholder for the document within the portal.

Virtual Conferencing

Using the computers to automatically allow contact with other parties by a videolink.

Virtual Whiteboarding

Virtual whiteboarding refers to tools that enable multiple users in different locations to view the same window in real time, as well as add text or draw free-form illustrations.

W
W3C

World Wide Web Consortium. A standards organization that develops inter-operable technologies for the web, including specifications, guidelines, software, and tools.

WAR

Web Archive File, a format distributing Java web applications.

Web Browsers

Web browsers are the client programs that allow users to view and interact with information provided by web servers, typically content on the World Wide Web or corporate intranets. A portal must not be tied too closely to a particular web browser in order to view all relevant web pages in their optimal form. A portal application should support Internet Explorer (IE) and Netscape Navigator, on both PC and Mac platforms.

Web Server

The Web Server works in conjunction with the

Application Server to provide the run-time environment for client requests. The web servers used with portals are standard HTTP web servers. When an end user brings up the portal page, the web browser makes a request of the web server. The web server then passes the request to the application server. The portal (and its associated Portlets) runs on top of the application server.

Web Service

A Web service is a program that accepts and responds to requests over the Internet. Typically, a Web service accepts requests in an XML-based format. The actual format of the request and the response depends on the XML standards that are being used. One such standard is SOAP. There are public registries and languages such as UDDI, WSDL - which are used to catalog the different available Web services. A calling program can query the registry (UDDI) to find an appropriate Web service, then use WSDL to figure out which parameters the service needs, and finally use a calling protocol and XML standard like SOAP to actually make the call to the Web Service

Web-based screen scraping

Screen scraping is a term that refers to a portal's ability to pull an entire web page, or specific sections of a web page, into a portal window. Usually this is done with an application that parses the HTML tags, which produces a Web page.

Wireless access

The portal's ability to deliver content, services and messages to wireless devices, such as phones and wireless-enabled PDAs

Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)

WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) is a specification for a set of communication protocols to standardize the way that wireless devices access the Internet. While Internet access has been possible in the past, different manufacturers have used different technologies. In the future, devices and service systems that use WAP will be able to inter-operate.

Wireless Markup Language (WML)

WML (Wireless Markup Language), formerly called HDML (Handheld Devices Markup Language), is a language that allows the text portions of Web pages to be presented on wireless devices. WML is part of the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP).

Wire-less subscription-based Alerts/notifications

Subscription-based notifications provide alerts to users' wireless devices when pre-determined events take place, such as when a threshold is crossed or when reply or new post is made to a discussion board.

Workflow

Workflow refers to the tasks, procedural steps, checkpoints, forms of review or approval, people, information, and tools needed to complete business processes. The term is also commonly used to refer to software that automates workflow processes or that allows administrators to custom-design workflow processes for automation. A number of companies make workflow automation products that allow a company to create a workflow model, utilize components such as online forms, and manage and enforce the consistent handling of work. A workflow engine is the component in a workflow automation program that knows all the procedures, procedural steps, and rules for each step. The workflow engine determines whether a process is ready to move to the next step. Some vendors sell workflow automation products for particular industries, such as insurance and banking, or for common processes, such as handling computer service calls. Proponents of the workflow approach believe that task analysis and workflow modeling, in itself, is likely to improve business operations by exposing these processes to rational consideration.

WSDL

WSDL (Web Services Description Language), format that can be used to specify a web service interface. WSDL is an XML based language that allows both calling programs and Web Services to describe legal ways to invoke the program. WSDL is important for portals because portals will typically aggregate information from multiple Web services onto a single screen and so need to communicate with each one in

the appropriate format.

WSUI

Web Services User Interface (WSUI) is a specification for standardizing the display of Web Services to endusers. This extends the traditional Web services model, which is used to get and retrieve XML data, by providing a framework for how that data will be displayed to end users. WSUI is akin to a standard way to describe Portlets. In the WSUI model, a Portlet makes a call to a Web service, gets back XML, and then users XSLT to transform that XML into HTML, which can then be displayed within the portal.

X
XML

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a language used to represent almost any type of data. XML is similar to HTML (they are both descendents of SGML, a generalized markup language). Whereas HTML is used to tell Web browsers how to show information to the end user, XML is more typically used to send information between programs. The XML files usually do not have information about the display of the information - the program that receives the data, often by using an XSL style sheet and XSLT, usually handles this separately. The structure of an XML file is usually defined by its DTD (document type definition) or XSD (XML Schema Definition). An XML processor is required to read XML documents and provide access to their content and structure.

XSL

Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is a language for creating a style sheet that describes how data sent over the Web using XML is presented to users. XSL documents contain rules for transforming that data into a presentation that the user can understand. This

presentation format might be HTML for Web browsers or it might be WML for wireless devices or PDF for printing out the information.