WebReference.com - Excerpts from chapter 7 of The Intelligent Wireless Web, from Addison-Wesley (2/4)

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The Intelligent Wireless Web

Enterprise Information Portals

During 1998, the first wave of Internet Portals became very popular. They provided consumers with personalized points of entry (or gateways) to a wide variety of information on the Internet. Examples included; MyYahoo (Yahoo), NetCenter (Netscape), MSN (Microsoft) and AOL.

Subsequently, Enterprise Information Portals (EIP), also called Corporate Portals or Enterprise Portals, provided ready access to information over Intranets and the Internet. Corporate Portals moved beyond the delivery of information, they also provide a way to integrate the many disparate systems and processes that are typically used within an enterprise. Corporate Portals are able to use XML to integrate previously separate legacy systems and to provide a single point of entry, or gateway, to these processes. EIPs now act as access centers that tie together people and data by linking e-mail, groupware, workflow, collaboration, and other mission-critical applications to portals.

Does the availability of vast amounts of data, readily searched, sorted and retrieved constitute an intelligent application? We should also include consideration of some of the other ways intelligence may be seeping onto the Internet, in the form of tools and services, such as:

• Document analysis systems for cataloging and summarizing Web pages
• Profiling systems for placing selective Web advertising
• Data mining and analysis
• Intelligent tools for searching databases supported by Web browsers
• Machine translation tools that convert to and from human languages
• Statistical software for network caching, routing, and tracking
• Knowledge-based systems for automated e-mail reading
• Smart agents for Internet-based product and service marketing
• Video object recognition and searching

EIPs, Cyc and the above applications represent today's "smartest" Web applications, but would you categorize any of them, as intelligent? Just what will it take for us to see Web applications and services as intelligent? In the next section we will identify the key tools for developing intelligent applications on the Web. We will follow this by describing the latest Web innovation, Web Services, and ask how intelligent applications could reach users as services.

[End of excerpt 1. Excerpt 2 continues with "How does the Web Learn?"]

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Created: March 20, 2002
Revised: March 20, 2002

URL: https://webreference.com/internet/intelligence/chap7/2.html