13.3 Classification of Data

OracleAS Portal provides access to information. The more information that is available, the greater the potential aggregate value of the information. However, large amounts of information can also be hard to organize and understand. To help make data more accessible, OracleAS Portal comes with two default ways to classify data ”categories and perspectives:

Categories

Each item in an OracleAS Portal site must belong to one, and only one, category . In this way, categories provide a taxonomy for content in OracleAS Portal. OracleAS Portal comes with its own set of built-in categories, and you can add your own categories. You can create a hierarchy of categories to further organize your content. Categories can be made available to specific page groups, or to all page groups.

Perspectives

Perspectives provide a way to organize content based on an idea of who might be interested in the content. For instance, you might have one perspective for managers, another for developers, and another for sales within your company. By selecting a particular perspective, a user can quickly focus on the content that is most pertinent to him.

An item can be assigned to more than one perspective. As with categories, you can create a hierarchy of perspectives.

Whenever you create either a category or a perspective, a page is created for the item. This page lists the content for that category or perspective.

In addition to categories and perspectives, you can add specific search terms, which may be used to find data, or you can use the functionality of Oracle Text to provide further search capabilities. Searching is described in the next section in the context of end-user interaction.