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To address the key problem of lack of use in the advancement of open government data (OGD) portals from the aspect of good usability, which is an essential prerequisite to the acceptance and usage of a portal, this paper aims to develop a usability framework including design principles and criteria for OGD portals and to discover problems in the present usability design.

This study builds the usability framework by extending usability principles for general websites to address the specific needs of OGD portals. Criteria for each principle are developed accordingly based on the literature. A comparative heuristic evaluation involving five expert evaluators and 13 Chinese province-level OGD portals has been carried out to test the capability of the usability framework.

A usability framework with 24 principles and 63 criteria has been built. The heuristic evaluation shows OGD portals performed better in meeting general principles than the OGD portals specific ones. Insufficient help functions weakened OGD portals' usability. Similarities and differences were found of Chinese OGD portals compared with similar studies in the United States.

This paper proposed a usability framework for OGD portals and proved its capability in recognizing usability problems and its causes by carrying out a comparative heuristic evaluation in China. By comparing the evaluation results with other studies in the United States, the findings and lessons learnt in this study can thus be shared across international borders.

With the fast growth of the internet, the development of industry portals for SMEs is becoming an increasingly important issue of economic growth. However, designing and developing efficient portals is not easy, and how to evaluate industry portals' performance has not yet been convincingly demonstrated. To address this gap, this paper aims to propose a framework.

The framework uses the analytic hierarchical process and incorporates both experts' and users' judgments into the performance evaluation process. It also employs three different objectives for performance evaluation including data quality, technology acceptance, and knowledge distribution. An exemplary case is given to demonstrate the proposed framework by empirically assessing an industry portal project, developed by Small and Medium Enterprise Administration, Ministry of Economic Affairs, Taiwan.

The proposed framework can enable industry associations to become more familiar with the nature and scope of portal performance evaluation.

Develops a framework which addresses the practical aspect of portal evaluation in terms of multiple objectives and involvement.

The purpose of this paper is to construct an indicator framework for evaluating open health data portals from the perspective of user experience (UX) to reduce users’ learning costs, save their time and energy and strengthen the emotional connection with users, thereby encouraging them to actively use open health data.

This study uses card sorting, Delphi and analytic hierarchy process to determine the weights of indicators for evaluating open health data portals. Then, this study uses a coding method to score, evaluate and compare the selection of more than 120 open health data portals supported by organizations in more than 100 countries or regions that are in the World's top confirmed cases of COVID-19 as released by the World Health Organization.

At present, open health data portals have shortcomings with regard to UX. Different types of open health data portals vary significantly in the dimensions of technical experience and functional experience, but the differences in the dimensions of aesthetic experience, emotional experience and content experience are not significant.

The constructed open health data portal evaluation indicator framework introduces users' actual application needs and proposes optimization suggestions for the portal to meet the needs of users to quickly obtain, reliable and accurate health data.

Knowledge management (KM) is an important consideration in e‐government portals to ensure that knowledge flows efficiently between governments, individuals and organisations. A crucial aspect of e‐government portals that has not been addressed adequately is the extent to which KM mechanisms have been implemented. Specifically, the authors argue that appropriate KM mechanisms are necessary to support the access, creation and transfer of knowledge between these portals and their users. The paper aims to propose an evaluation model for this purpose by first defining the main KM mechanisms and then burrowing deeper into their constituent dimensions.

An evaluation model known as knowledge access, creation and transfer (K‐ACT) is presented which identifies three KM mechanisms for portals: knowledge access, creation and transfer. Each mechanism is characterised by a set of dimensions and sub‐dimensions representing the tools and features for supporting that mechanism. The model was derived from an analysis of the literature and validated by two independent reviewers who were trained in information science, were familiar with the objectives of the project and understood the concepts underlying KM implementation in portals. Using this model, a checklist was developed and applied to 60 e‐government portals in the Asian and North American regions to investigate the extent to which these KM mechanisms have been implemented.

The findings indicate that, on average, e‐government portals featured only about 36 per cent of the KM mechanisms described in the model. Furthermore, no significant differences in the implementation of the KM mechanisms were found between the two regions' portals. The evaluation also offered potential areas for improvement based on the K‐ACT model.

The present work has developed an evaluation model known as K‐ACT which can be used to assess KM implementation gaps in e‐government portals. This model can also be generalised to other types of portals. The evaluation also provides insights into the state of KM processes in the portals of the Asian and North American regions.

To present the state of the arts application of semantic web technologies in web portals and corresponding achievable improvements for identifying the potential improvement made by semantic web technology.

An evaluation scheme is proposed to investigate various web portals that make use of semantic web technologies in order to identify their strengths and weaknesses. This scheme consists of three layers: information access, information processing and grounding technologies. Two academic portals and two commercial portals are selected based on the definition of semantic web portal. Detailed evaluation based on the proposed scheme is conducted on these four select portals.

Semantic web technologies can definitely increase the information consistency and the information processing quality of web portals by using ontologies to model portal structure and consensus knowledge. Furthermore, semantic web services will be acting as the key technologies to lift current portals to next level.

This paper proposes an elaborated evaluation method for investigating various portals. It reveals the current status of semantic web applications in web portals.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the usability and interface design of e‐learning portal developed for primary schools in Singapore.

Using Singapore‐based learning EDvantage (LEAD) portal as a case study, this paper reviews and analyses the usability and usefulness of embedded learning objects (LOs) for students aged nine years and above through learning theories such as behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism and interface design theories by Shneiderman, LO review instrument and laws of gestalt psychology.

Analysis found the portal to be sufficiently motivating and appealing to learners at Piaget's concrete operations stage. The interface design is universally structured and functional. An area for improvement highlighted in this case study is the lack of explicit mention of learning outcomes in the portal.

Usability principles used in this case study should be provided by the Ministry of Education in Singapore to schools to ensure more standardized and rigorous selection process of e‐learning portals.

This evaluation provides schools with insights into the use of learning theories and usability principles for evaluation of learning objects designed for primary‐going students. It aims to inform decision makers of issues in interactive design to consider before subscribing to any e‐learning portals. It also provides a gauge of current usability level of commercially developed portals as usage of such portals continue to proliferate in the Singapore education system.

This paper aims to identify and to understand how current data portals comply with open government data (OGD) principles in the context of Brazilian local government.

In this paper, we assessed a sample of 561 municipalities from a universe of interest of 3,052 ones expected to disclose information using the internet. As part of our methodology, the authors analyzed the required items for active disclosure and the technical requirements, all enforced by Brazilian law and close to OGD principles which are the focus of analysis of the authors.

The findings generally show the vast majority of assessed data portals did not comply with the basic requirements stated by national law, consequently not complying with OGD principles, and prevent society from benefiting from government data openness. The authors also found arguments that the national law should explicitly reproduce OGD principles, as they demonstrate clearer understanding about the global context of open data.

The contributions of this work can be used to plan public data openness actions over the internet and envision effective accountability and public participation with clearer legislation and with the effective implementation of OGD principles in data portals.

A common user interface replaces the multiple interfaces found among individual electronic library resources, reducing the time and effort spent by the user in both searching and learning to use a range of databases. Although the primary function of a common user interface is to simplify the search process, such products can be holistic solutions designed to address requirements other than searching, such as user authentication and site branding. This review provides a detailed summary of software currently on the market. The products reviewed were EnCompass, MetaLib, Find‐It‐All OneSearch, ZPORTAL, CPORTAL, InfoTrac Total Access, MetaFind, MuseSearch, SiteSearch, Single Search, Chameleon Gateway, and WebFeat.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a usability evaluation of governmental data portals and provide a list of best practices for improving stakeholders’ ability to discover, access, and reuse of these online information sources.

The developed methodology was based on the comprehensive literature review that resulted in a benchmarking framework of the most important criteria. A usability testing method was then applied with accordance to unique requirements of open data portals. This approach was demonstrated by using of a case study.

The main found weakness was a lack of support for active engagement of stakeholders. The list of best practices was introduced to improve the quality of these portals. This should help to improve the discoverability and facilitate the access to data sets in order to increase their reuse by stakeholders.

The creation of appropriate open data portals aims to fulfill the principles of open government, i.e., to promote transparency and openness through the publication of government data, enhance the accountability of public officials and encourage public participation, collaboration, and cooperation of involved stakeholders.

This paper proposed a new approach for the usability evaluation of open data portals on national level from an ordinary citizen’s point of view and provided important insights on improving their quality regarding data discoverability, accessibility, and reusability.

To investigate ways of demonstrating how portal implementations positively alter user information retrieval behaviour.

An opinion piece reflecting on existing evidence about the nature of portal implementations, which extrapolates trends in user behaviour on the basis of these reflections.

Although portal technologies probably do offer a way for libraries to create information tools that can compete with “one‐stop shop” Internet search engines, there are likely difficulties in their pattern of usage which will have to be detected by effective quality measurement techniques.

An expression of opinion about the possible pitfalls of using portals to optimise users’ information retrieval activity.

This opinion piece gives some clear and practical guidelines for the evaluation of the success of library portal implementations.

This editorial points out that, because the portal can be defined as a deliberate clone of a typical successful Internet search engine and may be presented to the naïve user in the same terms, the danger is that library portals might also clone the same information habits as Internet search engines, because of their ease of use. In trying to produce a tool that can meet Google on its own terms but with better content, we might reproduce some of the same educational disbenefits as Google: quality information retrieval is not purely a function of content, it is also a function of the user’s perceptions and information habits.