New Version of the AGRIS Web Portal – Overcoming the Digital Divide by Providing Rural Areas with Relevant Information

The present paper brings the outcomes of the second stage of a complex AGRIS web portal upgrade (technological, functional, content and design upgrade) called Agris 5.0. The Agris 5.0 version is recently being tested and will be launched in January 2012 on http://www.agris.cz. Agris 5.0 is built and runs on Microsoft technologies (MS Windows Server 2008, MS IIS 7 web server, MS SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, SP2) using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) SW architectural pattern version 3, .NET framework 4, programming language C#, Razor template system, XML and XHTML 1.1 markup languages, CSS 2.1 styles and JavaScript encoding with the jQuery framework. From the user point of view, the Agris portal usability and availability meeting international standards were the utmost priority of the present upgrade.Agris, portal, MVC, digital divide, agrarian sector, rural areas, information resource., Agribusiness, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, GA, IN,