How do portals fit into the JISC Information Environment?
Portals are an integral part of the JISC Information Environment (IE). The IE Technical Architecture diagrams show them as the point where content is brought together for display to the user. Thus, JISC portals will be involved in fusion and presentation activities. The IE Draft Development Strategy has incorporated this approach into the Portals and Fusion Programme, which is building and developing portals and portal technologies for use within the Information Environment. The Information Environment itself relies on a number of, possibly distributed, systems interacting with each other, each with their own role to play, portals and content providers being two of these. Interoperability is a key to this interaction and all parts of the IE are being developed with this in mind. The key technologies that support interoperability between JISC portals and content providers within the Information Environment are Z39.50, the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PM
