Design Principles for Internet Community Information Gateways: MARINFO - A Case Study for a Maritime Information Infrastructure

The goal of the MARINFO project and system is to create the major information infrastructure for the maritime community the maritime information gateway. MARINFO achieves this goal by fully exploiting modern information and communication technology as well as recent insights into community-oriented gateway design. For our purposes, a community is defined by a common sphere of activities with commonalities defined by well-documented Resources on which the activities are based, shared Interaction patterns by which the community cooperates, domain Categories which characterize the community’s field of interest, and high demands for Homogeneity in function presentation and data visualization. The MARINFO system follows these four principles the RICH approach to gateway design and provides enriched information and communication services which exploit typed interfaces to digital resources, internet-based secure interactions, extensive domain descriptions based on categories, and template-oriented visualization for overall presentation homogeneity. Digital representation of resources, internet-based interaction and template-oriented visualization are the technical means by which systems and services are realized, customized and personalized and by which a high degree of extensibility, automation and overall efficiency is achieved. Categories allow for the extensive and coherent structuring of domains along their essential dimensions conceptual, organizational, temporal etc. and provide unifying design guidelines for the entirety of system interfaces and services. From a design point of view MARINFO is a case study in Internet community information gateways, from an implementation point of view it is an exercise in component-oriented software construction.