Surveying the Landscape of Online Industry
By Tom Spitzer
Web experts invented a new word in 1999: vortal. A contraction of "vertical portal," vortal refers to a Web site that aggregates disparate content and services of interest to a particular industry and makes it available to industry members. Hundreds of vortals have appeared, serving many market-based communities, from electronic components to city management to construction to applied science to healthcare. A few vortals serve communities that are based on common noncommercial interests; travel sites like travelocity.com, real estate marketplace sites like realtor.com, hobbyists sites like garden.com, and WebMD.com fall into this category.
Developing a vertical portal concentrates all of the challenges of contemporary information systems design and development in a single vehicle. An effective vortal has to provide a broad variety of timely information, such as trends in legal, insurance, and regulatory issues affecting the industry, industry business news, updates on production technologies, and details about information systems that address the needs of industry participants. It provides application-based services, such as home-finance calculators for the real estate industry, and project-cost calculators for the construction industry. At the same time it has to create efficient virtual markets for goods and services that industry participants both use and produce.
On the development and management side, a vortal has to be capable of serving many simultaneous participants, representing a variety of subgroups. It needs to be able to handle frequent changes in content, and enable individual participants to customize their view of the site and the services it provides.
