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Europa

Europa logo
File:Europa.eu.png The English main page
URL	http://europa.eu/
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Public service portal and institutional information
Owner	European Union
Created by	DG Communication EU Publications Office

Europa (sometimes capitalised EUROPA) is the official web portal of the European Union (EU). It is intended to improve the public’s interaction with EU institutions by quickly directing website visitors to the services or information they are seeking. Europa links to all EU agencies and institutions in addition to press releases and audiovisual content from press conferences. Europa is also an umbrella over the EU sites in the sense that all agencies and institutions have got their respective name (or initials) in addition to the subdomain.europa.eu as standard URL. For example, the address of the Institute for Security Studies is iss.europa.eu.

Name[link]

Languages[link]

All legislation and documents of political importance are published in all 23 official EU languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish and Swedish. Documents which are not legally binding are usually published in English, French and German.

Translation controversy[link]

In January 2007, EU commissioner Franco Frattini criticised the web service for not translating an article about the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome into Italian, his own language.^[1]

Services[link]

Europa also offers services such as EUR-Lex, a Publications Office and libraries of photographs, videos and audio for the Commission and the Parliament.
Europa hosts Health-EU, a thematic portal on health in 22 official languages of the EU, which contains information from the EU member countries, non-government organisations and international bodies.

See also[link]

European Union portal

• EU Agencies
• EU Institutions
• EUR-Lex
• European NAvigator
• Publications Office

References[link]

External links[link]

• Europa

Look up Europa in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Europa may refer to:

People and characters[link]

• Europa (mythology), a Phoenician princess in Greek mythology, from whom the name of the continent Europe is taken
• Europa of Macedon, the daughter of Philip II by his last wife, Cleopatra
• Madama Europa, the nickname, or perhaps the real name, of Europa Rossi (fl. 1600), sister of the Jewish violinist and composer Salamone Rossi, who was one of the first opera singers

Geography[link]

• Europa Island, a small island in the Indian Ocean which is a possession of France
• Europa (Roman province), a province within the Diocese of Thrace

Astronomy[link]

• Europa (moon), one of Jupiter's moons
• 52 Europa, the seventh-largest known asteroid

In entertainment[link]

In film[link]

• Europa Europa, a 1990 film by Polish director Agnieszka Holland
• Europa, a 1991 film by Danish director Lars von Trier, released as Zentropa in North America; part of his "Europa trilogy"

In gaming[link]

• Europa (wargame), a series of board wargames launched in 1973
• Europa (Valkyria Chronicles), a fictional place in the video game Valkyria Chronicles
• Europa 1400, a 2002 video game
• Europa Barbarorum, a modification of the PC game Rome: Total War
• Sega Europa-R, an arcade game system board by Sega
• Europa Universalis, a 2000 strategy computer game
• Europa 1912 is an expansion to the board game Ticket to Ride: Europe

In literature[link]

• Europa (novel), by Tim Parks
• Europa, a novel by Romain Gary

In music[link]

• Europa (record label), a German record label
• Europa (album), by Covenant
• "Europa (Earth's Cry Heaven's Smile)", an instrumental from Carlos Santana's 1976 album Amigos
• "Europa" (Blondie song), the lead track on Blondie's 1980 album Autoamerican
• "Europa" (Globus song), a song from the album Epicon by Globus
• "Europa" (Mónica Naranjo song), a song from Mónica Naranjo's 2008 album Tarantula
• "Europa" (Rosetta song)", a song appearing on The Galilean Satellites by post-metal band Rosetta
• "Europa and the Pirate Twins", a song appearing on Thomas Dolby's 1982 album The Golden Age of Wireless

In sports[link]

• NFL Europa (formerly NFL Europe), an American football competition from 1991–2007
• UEFA Europa League, the second most important European competition for UEFA-eligible football clubs

In transportation[link]

• Europa rocket, an early expendable launch system project of the European Launcher Development Organisation
• Europa Aircraft, a light-aircraft kitplane company based in the UK
• Bizzarrini Europa, a small GT car produced by Bizzarrini between 1966 and 1969
• Lotus Europa, a sports car manufactured by Lotus Cars

Ships[link]

• HMS Europa, one of a number of ships and shore establishments of the Royal Navy
• Europa (ship), a traditionally rigged tall ship from the Netherlands, built in 1911
• SS Europa (1922), an immigrant ship on the Europe to North America route in 1950–51 (originally the SS Mongolia)
• SS Europa (1930), an ocean liner operated by the North German Lloyd in 1930–45
• MS Europa (1953), a combined ocean liner / cruise ship operated by the North German Lloyd in 1965–70 and Hapag-Lloyd in 1970–81
• MS Europa (1981), a cruise ship operated by Hapag-Lloyd in 1981–99
• MS Europa (1999), a cruise ship operated by Hapag-Lloyd since 1999
• MS Silja Europa, a cruise ferry operated by Silja Line since 1993
• Costa Europa, a cruise ship operated by Costa Cruises since 2002

Other uses[link]

• Europa (oil company), an oil company that operated in New Zealand until its purchase by BP in 1989
• Europa (web portal), the official web portal of the European Union
• Europa, the name of the 3.3 release of the open-source integrated development environment Eclipse (software)
• Europa Coins, coins with a common theme issued by European countries
• Europa Hotel, a hotel in Belfast, Northern Ireland
• Europa postage stamp, issued annually since 1956, representing the founding six members of the European Coal and Steel Community
• EuropaCorp, a French film studio

See also[link]

• Europe (disambiguation)
• Eupora, Mississippi

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

A web portal is a web site that brings together information from diverse sources in a unified way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displaying information (a portlet); often, the user can configure which ones to display.

Apart from the standard search engine feature, web portals offer other services such as e-mail, news, stock prices, information, databases and entertainment. Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications and databases, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether.

Examples of public web portals are AOL, Excite, iGoogle, MSN, Netvibes, and Yahoo!.

History[link]

In the late 1990s the web portal was a hot commodity. After the proliferation of web browsers in the late-1990s many companies tried to build or acquire a portal to have a piece of the Internet market. The web portal gained special attention because it was, for many users, the starting point of their web browser. Netscape became a part of America Online, the Walt Disney Company launched Go.com, IBM and others launched Prodigy, and Excite and @Home became a part of AT&T during the late 1990s. Lycos was said to be a good target for other media companies, such as CBS.

The portal craze, with old media companies racing to outbid each other for Internet properties, died down with the dot-com bust in 2000 and 2001. Disney pulled the plug on Go.com, Excite went bankrupt, and its remains were sold to iWon.com. Some portal sites such as Yahoo! and those others first listed in this article remain active.

Classification[link]

Horizontal vs. vertical portal (Vortals)[link]

Another definition for a horizontal portal is, that it is used as a platform to several companies in the same economic sector or to the same type of manufacturers or distributors.^[1] A vertical portal consequently is a specialized entry point to a specific market or industry niche, subject area, or interest, also called vortal.^[2]

Vertical information portal[link]

A vertical information portal (VIP) is a specialized entry point to a specific marketplace and or industry niche. VIP's provide news, editorial content, digital publications, and e-commerce capabilities. Separate from traditional vertical portals, VIP's provide dynamic multimedia applications including social networking, video posting, and blogging.

Types of web portals[link]

Personal portals[link]

A personal portal is a site on the World Wide Web that typically provides personalized capabilities to its visitors, providing a pathway to other content. It is designed to use distributed applications, different numbers and types of middleware and hardware to provide services from a number of different sources. In addition, business portals are designed for sharing and collaboration in workplaces. A further business-driven requirement of portals is that the content be able to work on multiple platforms such as personal computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and cell phones/mobile phones. Information, news, and updates are examples of content that would be delivered through such a portal. Personal portals can be related to any specific topic such as providing friend information on a social network or providing links to outside content that may help others beyond your reach of services. Portals are not limited to simply providing links. Information or content that is placed on the web may create a portal in the sense of a path to new knowledge and capabilities.

News portals[link]

The traditional media rooms all around the world are fast adapting to the new age technologies. This marks the beginning of news portals by media houses across the globe. This new media channels give them the opportunity to reach the viewers in a shorter span of time than their print media counter parts.

Government web portals[link]

At the end of the dot-com boom in the 1990s, many governments had already committed to creating portal sites for their citizens. These included primary portals to the Governments as well as portals developed for specific audiences. Examples of Government web portals include;

• australia.gov.au for Australia.
• newzealand.govt.nz for New Zealand.
• USA.gov for the United States (in English) & GobiernoUSA.gov (in Spanish).
• Disability.gov for citizens with disabilities in the United States.
• Directgov for citizens & businesslink.gov.uk for businesses in the United Kingdom.
• india.gov.in for India.
• Europa (web portal) links to all EU agencies and institutions in addition to press releases and audiovisual content from press conferences.
• Health-EU portal gathers all relevant health topics from across Europe.
• National Resource Directory links to resources for United States Service Members, Veterans and their families (NRD.gov).

Cultural Portals[link]

Cultural portal aggregate digitised cultural collections of galleries, libraries, archives and museums. This type of portals provides a point of access to invisible web cultural content that may not be indexed by standard search engines. Digitised collections can include books, artworks, photography, journals, newspapers, music, sound recordings, film, maps, diaries and letters, and archived websites as well as the descriptive metadata associated with each type of cultural work. These portals are usually based around a specific national or regional groupings of institutions. Examples of cultural portals include:

• DigitalNZ – A cultural portal led by the National Library of New Zealand focused on New Zealand digital content.
• Europeana – A cultural portal for the European Union based in the National Library of the Netherlands and overseen by the Europeana Foundation.
• Trove – A cultural portal led by the National Library of Australia focused on Australian content.
• In development - Digital Public Library of America

Corporate web portals[link]

Corporate intranets became common during the 1990s. As intranets grew in size and complexity, webmasters were faced with increasing content and user management challenges. A consolidated view of company information was judged insufficient; users wanted personalization and customization. Webmasters, if skilled enough, were able to offer some capabilities, but for the most part ended up driving users away from using the intranet.

Many companies began to offer tools to help webmasters manage their data, applications and information more easily, and through personalized views. Portal solutions can also include workflow management, collaboration between work groups, and policy-managed content publication. Most can allow internal and external access to specific corporate information using secure authentication or single sign-on.

JSR168 Standards emerged around 2001. Java Specification Request (JSR) 168 standards allow the interoperability of portlets across different portal platforms. These standards allow portal developers, administrators and consumers to integrate standards-based portals and portlets across a variety of vendor solutions.

The concept of content aggregation seems to still gain momentum and portal solution will likely continue to evolve significantly over the next few years. The Gartner Group predicts generation 8 portals to expand on the Business Mashups concept of delivering a variety of information, tools, applications and access points through a single mechanism.^{[citation needed]}

With the increase in user generated content, disparate data silos, and file formats, information architects and taxonomist will be required to allow users the ability to tag (classify) the data. This will ultimately cause a ripple effect where users will also be generating ad hoc navigation and information flows.

Corporate Portals also offer customers & employees self-service opportunities.

Stock portals[link]

Also known as stock-share portals, stock market portals or stock exchange portals are Web-based applications that facilitates the process of informing the share-holders with substantial online data such as the latest price, ask/bids, the latest News, reports and announcements. Some stock portals use online gateways through a central depository system (CDS) for the visitors to buy or sell their shares or manage their portfolio.

Search portals[link]

Search portals aggregate results from several search engines into one page.

Tender's portals[link]

Tender's portals stands for a gateway to search/modify/submit/archive data on tenders and professional processing of continuous online tenders.

With a tender portal the complete tendering process—submitting of proposals, assessment, administration—are done on the web.

Electronic or online tendering is just carrying out the same traditional tendering process in an electronic form, using the Internet.

Using online tendering, bidders can do any of the following:

• Receive notification of the tenders.
• Receive tender documents online.
• Fill out the forms online.
• Submit proposals and documents.
• Submit bids online.

Hosted web portals[link]

Hosted web portals gained popularity a number of companies began offering them as a hosted service. The hosted portal market fundamentally changed the composition of portals. In many ways they served simply as a tool for publishing information instead of the loftier goals of integrating legacy applications or presenting correlated data from distributed databases. The early hosted portal companies such as Hyperoffice.com or the now defunct InternetPortal.com focused on collaboration and scheduling in addition to the distribution of corporate data. As hosted web portals have risen in popularity their feature set has grown to include hosted databases, document management, email, discussion forums and more. Hosted portals automatically personalize the content generated from their modules to provide a personalized experience to their users. In this regard they have remained true to the original goals of the earlier corporate web portals. Emerging new classes of internet portals called Cloud Portals are showcasing the power of API (Application Programming Interface) rich software systems leveraging SOA (service oriented architecture, web services, and custom data exchange) to accommodate machine to machine interaction creating a more fluid user experience for connecting users spanning multiple domains during a given "session". Leading cloud portals like Nubifer Cloud Portal: [1] showcase what is possible using Enterprise Mashup and Web Service integration approaches to building cloud portals.

Domain-specific portals[link]

A number of portals have come about that are specific to the particular domain, offering access to related companies and services, a prime example of this trend would be the growth in property portals that give access to services such as estate agents, removal firm, and solicitors that offer conveyancing. Along the same lines, industry-specific news and information portals have appeared, such as the clinical trials specific portal: IFPMA Clinical Trials Portal

Engineering aspects[link]

The main concept is to present the user with a single web page that brings together or aggregates content from a number of other systems or servers. For portals that present application functionality to the user, the portal server is in reality the front piece of a server configuration that includes some connectivity to the application server. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is one example of how a portal can be used to deliver application server content and functionality. The application server or architecture performs the actual functions of the application. This application server is in turn connected to database servers, and may be part of a clustered server environment. High-capacity portal configurations may include load balancing equipment. SOAP, an XML-based protocol, may be used for servers to communicate within this architecture.

The server hosting the portal may only be a "pass through" for the user. By use of portlets, application functionality can be presented in any number of portal pages. For the most part, this architecture is transparent to the user.

In such a scheme, security and capacity can be important features, and administrators need to ensure that only an authorized visitor or user can generate requests to the application server. If administration does not ensure this aspect, then the portal may inadvertently present vulnerabilities to various types of attacks.

Standards[link]

• Web Services for Remote Portlets v1
• JSR 168 (Java
• JSR 286 (Java Portlet v2.0 Definition Standard)

Emerging standards[link]

See also[link]

• Client portal
• Extranet

References[link]

• Webopedia

Further Reading[link]

• "Untangle the Web". Communication News: 82–83. September 2001. ISSN 0010-3632. 

External links[link]

• Vertical Portals Definition by Content Manager
• Vertical Enterprise Portals by Industry

Look up web in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Web may refer to:

Biology[link]

• Spider web, a mesh built by a spider, composed of spider silk and usually used for trapping prey
• Interdigital webbing, skin membranes between the digits of semiaquatic mammals

Computing[link]

• World Wide Web or "the Web", a hypertext system that operates over the Internet
  • Web 2.0, a perceived transition of the Web from a collection of Web sites to a full-fledged computing platform serving Web applications
  • World Wide Web Conference (WWW), a yearly international academic conference on the topic of the future direction of the World Wide Web
  • World Wide Web Consortium, also known as W3C and W3.org, the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web
  • WorldWideWeb, the first web browser and editor
  • Web (web browser), the web browser included with GNOME desktop environment (previously known as Epiphany)
  • Web.com, a public company that offers websites and other services for small businesses and consumers
  • Webs (web hosting), a website which allows users to create free websites
• WEB, a computer programming system created by Donald Knuth to implement literate programming

Publications[link]

• The Web (comics), a comic book character
• Web (novel) by John Wyndham, posthumously published novel set on an island populated by spiders
• World English Bible (WEB), a public domain translation of the Bible
• The Web (series), a series of science fiction stories
• "The Web", a publication by Marillion.

Television, radio and film[link]

• WEBS (AM), a radio station at 1030 kHz, licensed to Calhoun, Georgia, United States
• The Web (film), a film noir
• The Web (TV series), a mystery/suspense anthology series
• "Web" (Law & Order: Special Victims Unit), an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
• Webs (film), a 2003 sci-fi movie
• The Web, a dangerous region of space in the ReBoot universe
• West End Broadcast (WeB FM), a radio station in Newcastle, England, that was a forerunner of NE1fm
• "The Web", an episode from the first season of the British science-fiction series Blake's 7

Miscellaneous[link]

• In mathematics, a linear system of divisors of dimension 3
• Offset printing web, a roll of paper is used, rather than individual pages
• Steel I-beams or trusses are made with a web, centered between the top and bottom flange
• Web Entertainment, a record label
• "The Web", a song from the album "Script for a Jester's Tear" by Marillion.
• Web (manufacturing) continuous sheets of material passed over rollers
• b:Nets, Webs and the Information Infrastructure

See also[link]

• Webb (disambiguation)
• Webbing: Webbing (textile), Interdigital webbing (Biology).

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Look up Portal, portal, or portals in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Portal may refer to:

• Portal (architecture), a gate, door, or the extremeties (ends) of a tunnel
• Portal (fiction), a magical or technological doorway that connects two different locations.

Computing[link]

• Enterprise portal, a framework to provide a single point of access to a variety of information and tools
• Intranet portal, a gateway that unifies access to all enterprise information and applications
• Portal rendering, an optimization technique in 3D computer graphics
• Web portal, a site that functions as a point of access to information on the Internet
• Portals network programming api, a high-performance networking programming interface for massively parallel supercomputers

Entertainment[link]

• Portal (interactive novel), a 1986 video game by Activision
• Portal (video game), a 2007 video game by Valve Corporation
• Portal 2, the sequel to Valve's 2007 video game Portal
• Portal (TV series), a series about MMORPGs

Geography[link]

• Portal, California
• Portal, Georgia
• Portal, North Dakota

Music[link]

• Portall, a Thrash-Death Metal band from the Netherlands
• Portal (Australian band), a metal band from Australia
• Portal (UK band), a band from the UK
• Portals (album), a 2009 album by Arsonists Get All The Girls

Other uses[link]

• Portal (comics), a Marvel comic character
• Portal (Magic: The Gathering), a set in the Magic: The Gathering card game
• Portal Bridge, over the Hackensack River in New Jersey
• Portal Software, a company based in Cupertino, California
• Clube Atlético Portal, a football club based in Uberlândia, Brazil
• Portals Athletic F.C., a defunct football club, based in Overton, England
• Portal (magic trick), an illusion performed by David Copperfield

People with the surname[link]

• Antoine Portal (1742–1832), French anatomist, doctor and medical historian
• Charles Portal, 1st Viscount Portal of Hungerford (1893–1971), British Marshal of the RAF and Chief of the Air Staff in World War II
• Wyndham Portal, 1st Viscount Portal (1885–1949), British businessman and public servant
• Michel Portal (born 1935), French composer, saxist, and clarinetist
• Nicolas Portal (born 1979), French professional road bicycle racer
• Gerald Portal (1858–1894), British colonial diplomat

See also[link]

Portal portal

Portal Directory

• El Portal, Florida
• Hepatic portal vein, a vein that drains blood from the digestive system
• Portal venous system, an occurrence where one capillary bed drains into another through veins
• Portal frame, a construction method
• Portal stones, a type of stone monument
• Porthole

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.