Welcome from the editors

A new research journal involves an element of risk. Will it meet a practical need? Will it play a unique role in an often-crowded area? Has it addressed an audience? And, most importantly, will researchers contribute their work to attract the audience and make it a success? The fields of web portals and Service Oriented Architecture generally today face two new challenges: First is the impact of the international economic situation on enterprise appetite for new technology investment. This comes alongside a second challenge, a debate on whether SOA will meet its promise or has been oversold by its advocates. Contributions in this and our previous two issues have already begun to address these questions. The paper by Andreas Prokoph from IBM Research Laboratory in Germany discusses the issues associated with modern web applications and servers such as Portal that require adequate support for integration of search services. The primary reasons being user focused information delivery and user interaction, as well as new technologies used to render such information for the user. An example being the two fundamental problems that web crawlers in the past already had to deal with: dynamic content and Javascript generated content. Even today the solution is simple: ignore such web pages. In order to enable ‘search’ in Portals, a different ‘crawling’ paradigm is required to allow for search engines to gather and consume information. WebSphere Portal provides a framework which propagates content and information through so-called Seedlistscomparable to HTML based sitemaps, but richer in terms of features. Of course it mandates that information or content delivering applications need to be ‘search engine aware’—it requires them to enable services and seedlists for fast, efficient and complete delivery of content and information. This would be the main integration point for search engines into the portal for Portal site search services with rich and user focused search experience.