Web Casts as Informal E-Learning for Scientific Centers

The advent of global digital networking, chiefly the Internet, broadened access to cultural portals with various remote online education resources, providing a unique behind-the scenes view of knowledge, and therefore re-established the visitor’s own ability of self-learning. Science centers capitalized on that development, as they expanded their mission beyond lab assessments and hands-on interactive exhibits using Web casting with explainers; the most recent innovative technology for real-time demonstrations involve real and virtual scientific institutions. Hence, adopting a multidisciplinary perspective covering both the humanities and natural sciences such as biology, heritage, physics, civilization, informatics, theology, medicine, anthropology, and even law for visitors have become involved in topical debates. Web casting allows individuals to form their viewpoints on contemporary concerns ranging from genetic engineering and sustainability to space exploration.

Watermarking Integration into Portals

Digital watermarking has become an accepted security technology to protect media such as images, audio, video, 3-D, or even text-based documents (Cox & Miller, 2002). Watermarking algorithms embed information into media data by imperceptible changes of the media. They enable copyright or integrity protection, broadcast monitoring, and various other applications. Depending on targeted application and media type, various concepts and approaches for digital watermarking exist.

University Portals as Gateway or Wall, Narrative, or Database

Most definitions of a portal involve the term “gate” or “gateway” and a Web portal can thus be seen as a gateway to information and services on the Web. In the context of corporate intranets, and universities in particular, the allusion is to the entrance to a walled city. The parallel is worthy of some consideration. As technologies develop and intranets expand to provide information tailored to specific user requirements, and access to personal information, authentication becomes a central issue.

A Study of a Wine Industry Internet Portal

A simple definition of a portal sees it as a special Internet (or intranet) Web site designed to act as a gateway to give convenient access to other related sites (Davison, Burgess, & Tatnall, 2003). Moreover, portals can be grouped or classified based on genre, with a diverse number of different types of portal types being based on alliances, geographic regions, special interest, and communities. Regional portals that are of particular interest in this article tend to be a special type of community portal centred on a specific locality. As such, they have a utility in providing various advantages for the participants, allowing them to feel as if they are part of, and contribute to, the local regional community. Moreover, there are significant benefits that portal participation provides in allowing firms to interact with other local businesses, allowing not only physical products/services to be transacted, but also in fermenting new business relationships (Sellitto & Burgess 2005). Indeed, regional portal participation contributes to the goodwill factor that manifests at the local business level and invariably, also at the social level throughout the regional community. This article introduces some background on portals, and provides an illustration of how a real-world regional wine cluster adopted an Internet portal to strengthen and benefit their regional partnerships. Arguably, the research is one of the few published works on industry clusters and their association to Internet portals.

Project Management Web Portals and Accreditation

Project management skills and professional certification are quickly developing into required core practice (Hammond et al., 2006). Peter Shears, CEO of the Australian Institute of Project Management (AIPM), stated at a April, 2006, conference, that there was increased demand for skilled project managers within all organizations across all industry sectors (Hammond et al., 2006). AIPM is an Australian Project Management Web portal offering certifications of AIPM’s Registered Project Management (RegPM). As a supporter of the project management profession, the Project Management Institute (PMI) also plays an enormous role. The PMI Web portal encourages a standard with the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) Guide describing what should be done to manage a project. PMI’s Project Management Professional (PMP®) credential program is also available from the PMI Web portal recognizing and approving skills (Project Management Institute, Inc., 2006).

Portals for Knowledge Management

Knowledge is often defined to be meaningful information. Knowledge is derived from information. What makes the difference between data and information is their organisation, and what makes the difference between information and knowledge is their interpretation (Bhatt, 2001). It is defined as a dynamic human process of justifying personal belief towards the truth (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). Knowledge can also be defined as know-why, know-how, and know-who, or an intangible economic resource from which future resources will be derived (Rennie, 1999). Knowledge is built from data, which is first processed into information (i.e., relevant associations and patterns). Information becomes knowledge when it enters the system and when it is validated (collectively or individually) as a relevant and useful piece of knowledge to implement in the system (Carrillo, Anumba, & Kanara, 2000). There are three types of knowledge within any organization, individual, group, and enterprise, and that knowledge can be generally classified along the lines of being explicit, embedded, and tacit. Explicit knowledge is knowledge represented in documents, books, e-mail, and databases. Embedded knowledge is organizational knowledge found in business processes, products, and services. Tacit knowledge is undocumented knowledge that is captured during business processes by knowledge workers.

Portal Strategy for Managing Organizational Knowledge

Since its maturity four or five years ago, portal has become the common practice in organizations. A portal strategy is a way in which a Web site is customized that provides people easy access to most of the information, tools and applications they need to use—all with a single sign-on. Portal has been growing rapidly within organizations. META Group’s Worldwide IT Benchmark Report 2004 confirms this trend, showing that 46% of their respondents spent more on portals in 2003 than they did in 2002 (36% spent the same, 18% spent less) (cited in Roth, 2004).

Personalizing Web Portals

A Web portal is a gateway to the information and services on the Web where its users can interchange and share information (Tatnall, 2005). It is designed and implemented for a specific community. However, it is unlikely that people who access a Web portal are all so similar in their interests that one standardized way of delivering information fits all needs. This has motivated the need for personalization in Web portals.

Mobile Portals for Knowledge Management

More and more people leave their fixed working environment in order to perform their knowledge-intensive tasks at changing locations or while they are on the move. Mobile knowledge workers are often separated from their colleagues, and they have no access to up-to-date knowledge they would have in their offices. Instead, they rely on faxes and messenger services to receive materials from their home bases (Schulte, 1999). In case of time-critical data, this way of communication with their home office is insufficient.

A Mobile Portal for Academe

Today, many working environments and industries are considered as knowledge-intensive, that is, consulting, software, pharmaceutics, financial services, and so forth, and the share of knowledge work has risen continuously during the last decades (Wolff, 2005). Knowledge management (KM) has been introduced to overcome some of the problems knowledge workers are faced when handling knowledge, that is, the problems of storing, organizing, and distributing large amounts of knowledge and its corresponding problem of information overload and so forth (Maier, 2004).