Influence of information product quality on informing users: A web portal context

Web portals have been used as information products to deliver personalized, feature-rich, and flexible information needs to Internet users. However, all portals are not equal. Most of them have relatively a small number of visitors, while a few capture the majority of surfers. This study seeks to uncover the factors that contribute the perceived quality of a general portal. Based on 21 factors derived from an extensive literature review on Information Product Quality (IPQ), web usage, and media use, an experimental study was conducted to identify the factors that are perceived by web portal users as most relevant. The literature categorizes quality factors of an information product in three dimensions: information, physical, and service. This experiment suggests a different clustering of factors: Content relevancy, Communication interactiveness, Information currency, and Instant gratification. The findings in this study will help developers find a more customer-oriented approach to developing high-traffic portals.ope

Distributed web editing for an institutional portal

This article offers a case study about content administration and management support for institutional portals. It describes the structure and workings of a shared web editing system that has been implemented for the official portal of the Education and Culture Section of Murcia’s Regional Government. The article offers general instructions and advice for excellent system performance. It highlights the benefits of decentralized web editing as a method for supplying high quality content in civil service portals and recommends considering an institutional portal to be an added public service in public administration

The Freshness of Web search engines’ databases

This study measures the frequency in which search engines update their indices. Therefore, 38 websites that are updated on a daily basis were analysed within a time-span of six weeks. The analysed search engines were Google, Yahoo and MSN. We find that Google performs best overall with the most pages updated on a daily basis, but only MSN is able to update all pages within a time-span of less than 20 days. Both other engines have outliers that are quite older. In terms of indexing patterns, we find different approaches at the different engines: While MSN shows clear update patterns, Google shows some outliers and the update process of the Yahoo index seems to be quite chaotic. Implications are that the quality of different search engine indices varies and not only one engine should be used when searching for current content

Evaluating global e-government sites: A view using web diagnostics tools

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2004 The AuthorsSeveral governments across the world have embraced the digital revolution and continue to take advantage of the information and communication facilities offered by the Internet to offer public services. Conversely, citizens’ awareness and expectations of Internet based online-public-services have also increased in recent times. Although the numbers of the different national e-Government web portals have rapidly increased in the last three years, the success of these portals will largely depend on their accessibility, quality and privacy. This paper reports the results of an evaluative study of a cross-section of e-Government portals from these three perspectives, using a common set of performance metrics and Web diagnostic engines. Results show that not only are there wide variations in the spectrum of information and services provided by these portals, but that significant work still needs to be undertaken in order to make the portals examples of ‘best practice’ e-Government services

An infrastructure for building semantic web portals

In this paper, we present our KMi semantic web portal infrastructure, which supports two important tasks of semantic web portals, namely metadata extraction and data querying. Central to our infrastructure are three components: i) an automated metadata extraction tool, ASDI, which supports the extraction of high quality metadata from heterogeneous sources, ii) an ontology-driven question answering tool, AquaLog, which makes use of the domain specific ontology and the semantic metadata extracted by ASDI to answers questions in natural language format, and iii) a semantic search engine, which enhances traditional text-based searching by making use of the underlying ontologies and the extracted metadata. A semantic web portal application has been built, which illustrates the usage of this infrastructure

Identifying the relevance of personal values to e-government portals' success: insights from a Delphi study

Most governments around the world have put considerable financial resources into the development of e-government systems. They have been making significant efforts to provide information and services online. However, previous research shows that the rate of adoption and success of e-government systems vary significantly across countries. It is argued here that culture can be an important factor affecting e- government success. This paper aims to explore the relevance of personal values to the e-government success from an individual user’s perspective. The ten basic values identified by Schwartz were used. A Delphi study was carried out with a group of experts to identify the most relevant personal values to the e-government success from an individual’s point of view. The findings suggest that four of the ten values, namely Self-direction, Security, Stimulation, and Tradition, most likely affect the success. The findings provide a basis for developing a comprehensive e-government evaluation framework to be validated using a large scale survey in Saudi Arabia

Semantic-enhanced hybrid recommender systems for personalised e-Government services

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.E-Government is becoming ever more active in terms of improving the provision of services to citizens from a citizen-centred perspective, in which online services and information are delivered to citizens on a personalised basis. Some developed governments have started to offer personalised services through their official portals. However, the personalised services that are offered are mostly limited to static customisation and are therefore far from achieving effective citizen-centred e-Government services. Furthermore, delivering personalised online services that match the different needs and interests of government users is a challenge for e-Government, specifically in connection with the increasing information and services that are offered through the medium of government portals. Therefore, more advanced and intelligent e-Government systems are desirable. Personalisation techniques, particularly in the form of recommender systems, are promising to provide better solutions to support the development of personalisation in e-Government services. Furthermore, semantic enhanced recommender systems can better support citizen-centred e-Government services and enhance recommendation accuracy. The success of semantic enhanced hybrid recommendation approaches and the citizen-centric initiative of e-Government have fostered the idea of developing personalised e-Government recommendation service systems using semantic enhanced hybrid recommender systems. Accordingly, the effectiveness of utilising the semantic knowledge of e-Government services to enhance the recommendation quality of offered services is addressed in this thesis. This thesis makes five significant contributions to the area of e-Government personalised recommendation services. These contributions are summarised as follows: (i) the thesis first proposes a general framework for offering personalised e-Government services from a citizen-centred perspective based on the available user profiles information and semantic knowledge of a specific e-Government domain of interest; (ii) based on this general framework, a personalised e-Government tourism service recommendation framework is also proposed and considered as a target domain in this research study; (iii) new semantic enhanced hybrid recommendation approaches are developed to support the implementation of the recommendation generator engines of the proposed e-Government frameworks. The recommendation generator engines represent the core components of the proposed frameworks; (iv) new semantic similarity measures based on semantic knowledge of a target domain ontology are proposed to effectively evaluate the similarity between e-Government service items. The new semantic similarity measures are incorporated within the proposed hybrid approaches to improve the quality and accuracy of recommendations and to overcome the limitations of existing hybrid recommendation approaches; and (v) a switching semantic enhanced hybrid recommendation system is further proposed to enhance the overall quality of recommendation, address the sparsity, the cold-start user and item problems. Experimental evaluations of the proposed semantic enhanced hybrid recommendation approaches and switching system, on a real world tourism dataset, show promising results against state-of-the-art recommendation approaches in terms of the quality of recommendations, capacity to alleviate the sparsity, cold-start item and user problems

DEVELOPING AND VALIDATING A QUALITY ASSESSMENT SCALE FOR WEB PORTALS

The Web portals business model has spread rapidly over the last few years. Despite this, there have been very few scholarly findings about which services and characteristics make a Web site a portal and which dimensions determine the customers’ evaluation of the portal’s quality. Taking the example of financial portals, the authors develop a theoretical framework of the Web portal quality construct by determining the number and nature of corresponding dimensions, which are: security and trust, basic services quality, cross-buying services quality, added values, transaction support and relationship quality. To measure the six portal quality dimensions, multi item measurement scales are developed and validated.Construct Validation, Customer Retention, E-Banking, E- Loyalty, Service Quality, Web Portals

The organizational dynamics enabling patient portal impacts upon organizational performance and patient health: a qualitative study of Kaiser Permanente.

BackgroundPatient portals may lead to enhanced disease management, health plan retention, changes in channel utilization, and lower environmental waste. However, despite growing research on patient portals and their effects, our understanding of the organizational dynamics that explain how effects come about is limited.MethodsThis paper uses qualitative methods to advance our understanding of the organizational dynamics that influence the impact of a patient portal on organizational performance and patient health. The study setting is Kaiser Permanente, the world's largest not-for-profit integrated delivery system, which has been using a portal for over ten years. We interviewed eighteen physician leaders and executives particularly knowledgeable about the portal to learn about how they believe the patient portal works and what organizational factors affect its workings. Our analytical framework centered on two research questions. (1) How does the patient portal impact care delivery to produce the documented effects?; and (2) What are the important organizational factors that influence the patient portal's development?ResultsWe identify five ways in which the patient portal may impact care delivery to produce reported effects. First, the portal's ability to ease access to services improves some patients' satisfaction as well as changes the way patients seek care. Second, the transparency and activation of information enable some patients to better manage their care. Third, care management may also be improved through augmented patient-physician interaction. This augmented interaction may also increase the 'stickiness' of some patients to their providers. Forth, a similar effect may be triggered by a closer connection between Kaiser Permanente and patients, which may reduce the likelihood that patients will switch health plans. Finally, the portal may induce efficiencies in physician workflow and administrative tasks, stimulating certain operational savings and deeper involvement of patients in medical decisions. Moreover, our analysis illuminated seven organizational factors of particular importance to the portal's development--and thereby ability to impact care delivery: alignment with financial incentives, synergy with existing IT infrastructure and operations, physician-led governance, inclusive decision making and knowledge sharing, regional flexibility to implementation, continuous innovation, and emphasis on patient-centered design.ConclusionsThese findings show how organizational dynamics enable the patient portal to affect care delivery by summoning organization-wide support for and use of a portal that meets patient needs

Enterprise portals: addressing the organisational and individual perspectives of information systems

Enterprise portals are being viewed as the next generation application platform of choice, offering benefits over both client/server and thin client arrangements. By providing a mediating layer between the information applications and resources of the organisation and the individuals using them, enterprise portals appear to provide a unique context to allow both the organisational and individual perspectives of information systems to be addressed. This study seeks to examine these often competing perspectives of information systems by using an exploratory empirical survey to investigate the actual deployment of enterprise portals within a range of different organisations. It is found that both the individual and organisational benefits that enterprise portals can offer appear to have been recognised, and coherent sets of services addressing each of these perspectives are being developed. Consistent with diffusion and acceptance of technology models, organisations appear to be commencing their portal developments with services that will ensure utilisation by individuals, and are subsequently seeking to realise organisational level benefits