portal (redirected from vena portae)

A Web "supersite" that provides a variety of services including Web search, news, free e-mail, discussion groups, shopping and links to other sites. The major general-purpose Web portals are Yahoo!, MSN and AOL. Many portals allow the home page to be personalized (see personal portal). Prior to the Web, CompuServe and AOL functioned as portals, aggregating information from various sources.

The Vortal
Portals also serve vertical markets. The vertical portal (vortal) provides news and articles for a particular industry such as IT, banking or insurance. It may also include general information such as top news stories and weather. See corporate portal, business intelligence portal, vertical portal and portal server.

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1.		PORTAL - Process-Oriented Real-Time Algorithmic Language. ["PORTAL - A Pascal-based Real-Time Programming Language", R. Schild in Algorithmic Languages, J.W. deBakker et al eds, N-H 1981].
2.	(World-Wide Web)	portal - A website that aims to be an entry point to the World-Wide Web, typically offering a search engine and/or links to useful pages, and possibly news or other services. These services are usually provided for free in the hope that users will make the site their default home page or at least visit it often. Popular examples are Yahoo and MSN. Most portals on the Internet exist to generate advertising income for their owners, others may be focused on a specific group of users and may be part of an intranet or extranet. Some may just concentrate on one particular subject, say technology or medicine, and are known as a vertical portals.