The Online Knowledge Center: Building a Component Based Portal

Abstract This paper presents an overview of the Online Knowledge Center (OKC) web portal. The OKC is built around a portlet/container architecture: a central control portal is composed of several portlets that can deliver both local content and content from remote servers. The modular structure allows us to develop sophisticated portal components independently and plug them into the portal container using well defined XML interfaces. We describe problems we have discovered with this architecture and extensions and solutions that we are implementing. We also describe two advanced services that can be plugged into the overall framework: XML message-based newsgroup