Universal Research Portal

This thesis contains the design and development of a universal research portal. A research portal is designed to support researchers and other stakeholders, such as research spon-sors, at finding relevant research by structuring content of a specific scientific domain, make the content accessible, and present it to the stakeholders. The research portal pre-sented in this thesis is community-driven and fosters collaboration within the research community as users can contribute own research and knowledge to the portal and can use the research portal for communication with peers. Furthermore, this dissertation shows that the developed research portal more mature than existing research portals.
Research portals deal with problems caused by the
The cases have shown that even if users are consuming the information offered in research portals, many portals are struggling with low activity of users in form of contributed knowledge and engagement in the portal’s research community. This results in research portals without a vivid community and leads to portals being outdated and abandoned after a short period of time. Many observed portals do not live up to their potential. This is similar to the is-sues that often occur in knowledge management (KM) initiatives of enterprises. Many KM initiatives are challenged by limited contribution and for companies it is hard to motivate their staff to contribute to knowledge management systems and to explicate and share their knowledge (Davenport, 2005). Reasons not to contribute include missing incentives, not enough time, and losing competitive advantages by sharing knowledge (P5).
A third issue of current research portals is the costly implementation and the complex setup and maintenance of a feature-rich research portal. Currently, research portals are not available off the shelf. They are custom-made for the purpose and need to be imple-mented by the owner. Hence, research portal operators need to be technically skilled. Fur-thermore, the required human resources and a budget for implementation need to be available.
Based on the setup requirements, the desired functionality of the artifact needs to be determined, its architecture is chosen and it is implemented (Peffers et al., 2006). In several subsec-tions, details on the design and development of the research portal generator are given. First, the different design iterations are introduced. Second, the technical design and core of the research portal are presented. In the next four subsections the handling of content, content access, visualizations, community building, and quality management of the re-search portal are