1. www.portal.ac.uk/spp The Subject Portals Project JISC Portals and Shared Services Meeting 22 nd -23 rd May 2003 Ruth Martin Subject Portals Project Manager UKOLN

2. 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)

3. www.portal.ac.uk/spp RDN partners

4. www.portal.ac.uk/spp Two other partners

5. 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

6. 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.

7. 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).

8. 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

9. 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

10. www.portal.ac.uk/spp Portal architecture: core and portlets

11. 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

12. www.portal.ac.uk/spp Access management SPP authentication module: Replaces frameworks 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

13. www.portal.ac.uk/spp

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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.

17. 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

18. 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?

19. www.portal.ac.uk/spp Contacts: Julie Stuckes Project Manager UKOLN University of Bath j.a.stuckes@ukoln.ac.uk Jasper Tredgold Technical Co-ordinator ILRT University of Bristol jasper.tredgold@bristol.ac.uk