This is a proposal creating a portal for publishers focussing on a specific topic area (e.g., pharmacy, legal). There are two main applications: 1) The information in the portal can be used by editors in the topic specific publishing company to gather information from the net efficiently. 2) The information contained by the portal can be maintained by the publisher and revenue can be generated through advertisement by topic specific vendors.
Publishers of articles spent a lot of time searching through and reading existing material. A lot of this time is not efficiently spent because only part of the information space is available and there are not resources to perform a proper search through this information space.
Observation: There are a lot of situations where there is an information request and
Solution: A user could formulate its problem, and send out an agent to find the solution on the web. This requires a long time between question and answer. A better way is to summarize the information space in a single location and make queries on that space. This can be made feasable if the information space is reasonably small, for example, in the case the publisher is concentrating on specific topics. In short, a topic specific portal would be appropriate in these kind of situations.
See whizbang, machine learning and knowledge discovery and data mining converences for a flood of ideas. Flipdog is an impressive example of an automatically build portal applied to job openings.
The Focussed crawler is another approach.
Using existing technologies allows for producing a publisher specific portal with very little financial effort. The worst case scenario is that the portal would not be used because users keep on using their old habits. Input from those users can be fed to the portal to make it more acceptable to them.
Last updated: 17 Dec 2000 webmaster