Abstract:
Web portals are gateway to customized, collective information for integration and dissemination.
With the new emerging technologies such as XML, web applications and web services, the design and
development of web based systems have increasingly become more complex and challenging. In addition, the
utilization of portals has gone beyond the traditional HTML/script based static data presentation. Today, we
argue that, a portal is more than a gateway to customized, collective information and more than a snapshot of the
underlying information sources. It is a one-stop-window for a variety of semantically related (distributed)
information and related interactive (web) applications all serving its user to achieve his/her multitude of tasks.
At present, many technologies exists for the deployment of successful web portal systems, but a well-defined
design methodology (from conceptual level to implementation level) does not exist to support such
development. In this paper, we propose a methodology which combines the techniques of XML Views [Raju03]
and Web Navigation Model [WG03] to support the analysis (at the conceptual level), design (at the logical level)
and deployment (at the implementation level) of eXtensible (web) portals called xPortal. It is a design
methodology and a technological solution to successfully design and implement web portals.
