In the past two years, the Unidata portal has grown to over 3000 members from 52 countries. The portal has improved the way we as an organization distribute information and software by taking advantage of content management and point and click software licensing. However, as portal development moves forward, it has become clear that the current design will not be adequate to support the growing community.

With personalization still being a high level goal, we're considering moving forward with a slightly different approach. The next version of the Unidata portal will be built around web services. Rather than trying to track down news feeds and other items of interest, we plan to let the community submit feeds and web services that they find interesting and then add them to a list that registered members can select from for display on their home page.

Web services provide a way for applications and web pages to communicate with applications that live on servers anywhere in the world. By taking advantage of this technology, Unidata can display a person's work (if it's built as a web service) on our site for the entire community to see and use. This will also provide for more sharing of information between members of our community and hopefully help in creating new collaborations.

With the new portal framework, currently in its design phase, community members will be able to submit a web service by providing the name, location, description, and type (RSS, XML-RPC, SOAP, other) of the existing service they would like to have added to Unidata's list. The goal is to allow users to see news, data products, and information from other UCAR divisions or organizations without having to leave the Unidata site and without the necessity for the UPC to control those features. Unidata will also be sharing its web services with the community for use in other applications and web pages.