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www.portal.ac.uk/spp
The Subject Portals Project
JISC Portals and Shared Services Meeting 22nd-23rd May 2003
Ruth Martin
Subject Portals Project Manager UKOLN
www.portal.ac.uk/spp
The Subject Portals Project (SPP)
• 2 year project, ending August 2003
• Funded by JISC as part of its 5/99 DNER Enhancement call
• Started life as “Subject Access to the DNER” – acronym SAD!
• Now known as SPP (mercifully)
www.portal.ac.uk/spp
RDN partners
www.portal.ac.uk/spp
Two other partners
www.portal.ac.uk/spp
So, what is a subject portal?
• Tailored view of the web within a particular subject area
• Ability to cross-search specially selected resources
• Single authentication/authorisation at log-on
www.portal.ac.uk/spp
Subject portals continued...
• Storage of user profiles
• Alerting service
• Newsfeeds
• Additional services: jobs listings; web resource catalogues; e-journal search engine etc.
www.portal.ac.uk/spp
The aim?
Seamless access to a range of specially selected high-quality information resources for users in the UK Higher and Further Education community (and beyond).
www.portal.ac.uk/spp
Modular development
• Development of portlets, not portals
• Gives hubs choice of which functions to install
• Non-framework specific, freeing us to embed portlets in other portal environments
www.portal.ac.uk/spp
The architecture
• Core– Portal framework
–Access management system–User profiling
–Storage for user data–Available to all portlets
• Portlets– Framework provides portlet API
www.portal.ac.uk/spp
Portal architecture: core and portlets
www.portal.ac.uk/spp
Portal framework
• Jetspeed– Apache open source java portal framework– Provides tools for personalising layout, portlet
selection etc.
• Design allows for other portal frameworks– Bridge code hides framework specifics
• Java Community Process portal standards• Currently working to test portlet installations in
uPortal
www.portal.ac.uk/spp
Access management
SPP authentication module:• Replaces framework’s system• Provides
1) national authentication–e.g. Athens Single Sign-On
2) local authentication–e.g. LDAP
• Provides a profile of users’ access rights to various resources
www.portal.ac.uk/spp
www.portal.ac.uk/spp
Plugged-In AM
Users
Resources
Access Management
PortalFramework
Plug-in
NAS(Athens)
LAS(LDAP Server) Login Modules
Athens LDAP/SSL
www.portal.ac.uk/spp
Work with Athens
• Athens Single Sign-On (SSO) allows publishers to implement the Athens agent to allow users to log on once and move between Athens-protected resources
• Athens Devolved Authentication (DA) allows an institution to use its local authentication system to authorise access to Athens-protected resources
www.portal.ac.uk/spp
Access management
• Aim for portal to act as broker between user and the authentication service on behalf of the resource provider
• And thus enable users to enter credentials only once, at log-on, for every resource they are authorised to use
• A relationship of trust
www.portal.ac.uk/spp
Cross-searching
• Resources selected by the hubs to reflect subject interests
• “Wish-list” of 140 resources – work on-going to include as many as possible
• Supporting Z39.50 compliant targets at present – but hope to extend this to other protocols such as XML, OAI, SOAP etc
• Also collaborating with Xgrain broker service.
www.portal.ac.uk/spp
More on cross-searching
• Work has involved negotiating with resource providers for access to resources
• Advantage of increased visibility of resources
• On-going support from resource providers crucial
www.portal.ac.uk/spp
The future
• Movement from project to service• Continuing technical development
- exploring feasibility of embedding portal functions into institutional portals, VLEs etc
- offering portlets as open source developments
• Collaborative work the way forward for the RDN?
www.portal.ac.uk/spp
Contacts:
Julie Stuckes
Project Manager
UKOLN
University of Bath
Jasper Tredgold
Technical Co-ordinator
ILRT
University of Bristol
