RWTHWeb

RWTHWeb

Cooperative Content Management
complex web sites by heterogeneous organisations

Overview

The goal of the RWTHWeb project (10/97 - 9/99) was to build a web portal for the Technical University of Aachen (RWTH), which could be collaboratively maintained by the numerous information providers within the departments of the RWTH administration.

Project Partner

The editorial part of the project has been done by Thomas v. Salzen of the RWTH Public Relations Office.

Results

A collaborative process with three components is used to publish each new issue of the RWTHWeb. In the first step the information providers update their specific sub webs. The structure of the sub webs reflects the structure of the organizational units. In the next step a automatic publication process merges and restructures the sub web from the organizational to a topic based overall structure. After a quality and consistency control cycle the result is released in the third step to the public. The process is currently used for the RWTHWeb to publish regularly more then 2000 updated web pages from about twenty providers.

To support the navigation within a web site with thousands of web pages the sitemap applet was developed. The applet has two functions. To help the visitor with the “lost in hyperspace problem” the applet (1) visualizes position and context of the current page within the hierarchical structure. The applet also presents a complete click able directory of all web pages within the hierarchy, thus allowing to (2) reach directly all pages within RWTHWeb.