Abstract
The use of Web portals continues to rise, showing their importance in the current information society. Specifically, this chapter focuses on portlet-based portals. Portlets are Web components, and they can be thought of as COTS but in a Web setting. Recently, the Web service for remote portlets (WSRP) standard has come into existence. Its aim is to provide a common interface in order to allow the communication between portal and portlets. Bearing all that in mind, in this chapter we propose an ontology for this standard. This ontology offers an understandable summary of the standard. Thus, the ontology leads both portlet and portal developers to focus their effort on developing the portlet domain logic instead of implementing its communication.
Key Terms in this Chapter
WSRP: Web services for remote portlets, a standard whose aim is to allow the development of standard portlets.
Quality Model: Set of dimensions and the relationships between them relevant to a context, which can be split up into sub-dimensions; these sub-dimensions are composed of attributes whose objective is to assess the quality. For each attribute, one or more metrics can be defined in order to assess its value.
Portlet: A basic component of a portal, used by portals as pluggable user-interface components, which represents an interactive Web mini-application and is deployed on a portal server.
Portal Quality: Degree to which the portal facilitates services and provides relevant information to the customer.
Ontology: Defines the basic terms and relations comprising the vocabulary of a topic area, as well as the rules for combining terms and relations to define extensions to the vocabulary.
Web Portals: Internet-based applications that enable access to different sources (providers) through a single interface which provides personalization, single sign-on, and content aggregation from different sources, and which hosts the presentation layer of information systems.
JSR 168: Java standarization request, a standard that is specific for portlets which are developed by using Java.