Large-scale Integrated Academic Portals

The increasing availability of fixed/wireless network connectivity and the integration of telecommunication systems and the Internet create novel opportunities for users who can benefit from anytime anywhere access to a growing amount of Internet/Intranet Web information. In particular, university communities clearly perceive the potential benefits of widespread availability of Web-based services, which should satisfy heterogeneous requirements from different classes of users, e.g., students, teachers, administrative and technical staffs. However, university Web sites are typically populated by autonomous institutions (faculties, departments, research groups, …) that desire to maintain an independent control over data content. Consequently, data from different sites of the same university are usually organized in different ways, by rarely reflecting a common standard for data presentation, representation, and communication; such a plethora of heterogeneous academic/educational information poses novel management and technological challenges. On the one hand, the lack of a centralized entry point for service delivery and information retrieval creates difficulties for users, forced to browse many links before reaching the desired contents. On the other hand, the lack of a standard for data classification and presentation obstacles service/data integration and interoperability. The academic community of the University of Bologna, the oldest university in the western world, had to face the above technological and management challenges emerging in large scale organizations. In fact, Bologna university community groups many academic and administrative institutions, willing to share common standards of data presentation/communication even though maintaining their autonomy in data management. These challenges have been faced by designing and implementing an integrated academic/educational Web Portal (UniBo) (The Web Portal, 2005). The UniBo project focuses on two main goals: first, to impose the University of Bologna as a single entry point for transmitting social-cultural knowledge through novel communication channels, such as fixed and wireless networks; second, to organize and customize the heterogeneous data provided by different institutions to easily satisfy the requirements of various user targets (different views for students, teachers, and administrative staff). In the following, we present the peculiar aspects of the UniBo project, by pointing out the motivations of the technological choices made and the crucial challenges of activity reorganization deriving from developing such a large-scale Web Portal. In particular, the contribution underlines the relevance of implementing an integrated technological platform that not only enables common technological, graphic, and usability standards, but also permits the access to shared application services and to university databases about staff, students, teaching activities, and research projects.