What are “open portals?
Geospatial portals can be thought of as the “hubs” or “geoinformation resource supermarkets” in the Spatial Web. A portal is a Web site that gives visitors organized access, typically through catalog services (services not too different from those provided by search engines), to data and processing resources on the Web, and perhaps also to people, organizations and publications. A portal offers an organized collection of links to many other sites. A portal thus can be used to aggregate content. And by attracting a large number of visitors who share a common interest, a portal also aggregates content seekers for the benefit of content providers and potentially for the benefit of that community of content seekers. Users of geospatial portals based on the OpenGIS Portal Reference Architecture are able to immediately access – pan, zoom, compose, save and print – views of digital geospatial content held on diverse Web-connected servers. Multiple maps from multiple servers can be overlaid an
Geospatial portals can be thought of as the “hubs” or “geoinformation resource supermarkets” in the Spatial Web. A portal is a Web site that gives visitors organized access, typically through catalog services (services not too different from those provided by search engines), to data and processing resources on the Web, and perhaps also to people, organizations and publications. A portal offers an organized collection of links to many other sites. A portal thus can be used to aggregate content. And by attracting a large number of visitors who share a common interest, a portal also aggregates content seekers for the benefit of content providers and potentially for the benefit of that community of content seekers.
