What do you want to know about portals?
Empowering scientific communities with simple tools that enable them to utilise services of the European Grid Infrastructure is highly important for the successful engagement of EGI with with new users. Portals play an important role here. Portals can eliminate barriers of e-Infrastructure access, portals can seamlessly integrate the Grid and the Web. Because of their strong relation to users, portals are typically geared to specific use cases. Several NGIs, user communities and projects of EGI offer portals or reusable "portalt builder technologies" for end users and for portal developers. Meanwhile this diversity is beautiful, it certainly complicates decision making. Which portal or portal builder technology should I use? During the last EGI Technical Forum the User and Community Support Team of EGI.eu organised a topical workshop on portal technologies and tried to answer that question. The workshop brought together three groups from EGI:
- Software developers who produce reusable components for portal development.
- Providers of portal services: both software based services (the portals themselves) and human services (such as consultancy and training)
- Scientific communities who require and/or already use portals to interact with the e-Infrastructure.
- EGI.eu creates the first draft of the questions for the table. These questions will be used to collect information about existing solutions, to evaluate and compare the portal technologies.
- The questions are sent to the EGI community for review to ensure that the questions cover the critical aspects that we would like to disseminate and know about portals.
- Based on the community review EGI.eu prepares the final list of questions and circulate these to portal developers and portal providers.
- Portal developers and providers answer the questions about their own solutions and send the data back to EGI.eu.
- EGI.eu collects and validates the answers, then publicise them to the community.
