EVISA's web portal

Aims & Scope
EVISA's homepage plays a main role for structuring the Institute itself but also for providing the tool for fulfilling its specific objectives at the operational level.

EVISA's public web portal at www.speciation.net is the entrance hall of the institute. This web portal has been created and is maintained to

• inform the public about the goals and activities of EVISA
• inform the public about news related to speciation with respect to methods, techniques, legislation and politics
  
• act as a portal for the different clients of EVISA
• promote the speciation approach within the different areas of education, industry, legislation and politics
• provide a discussion forum for all aspects of speciation

Content hosted on EVISA's website
EVISA’s public data center has been build-up to serve the community with all types of information about speciation analysis and related topics:

• About EVISA (Partners, Services)
• About Speciation (Books, CRMs, Legislation)
• News (Methods, Standards, Products, Politics, Legislation)
• Agenda (Conferences, symposia, workshops, training courses, deadlines)
• Discussion forum
• Vacancies (Ph.D. students, PDF’s, Permanent staff)
• Glossary
• Links (provide fast access to information about a single element or topic)
  

Further, a set of highly interlinked databases provides easy access to different types of information related to elemental speciation, such as:

• Companies (Instrument manufacturers, material producers, publishers and organizations)
• Instruments (Instruments used for trace element and speciation analysis)
• Components (Accessories and spare parts)
• Materials (Standards, Reference Materials, Sorbents etc.) 
• Journals
• External information (Links to other web sites providing useful information)
• Scientists (being active in speciation related sciences)

All databases provide context-related search engines. Further a site-specific advanced search engine allows to search over all content of the EVISA web portal including all databases.

Features of EVISA's web portal
All parts of EVISA's web portal are highly interlinked to each other and to content residing on external web servers. The following tools provide fast access to relevant information:

• Glossary: A glossary of more than 600 entries briefly explains all terms used in different domains related to elemental speciation.
• Glossarization: Keywords on a content or database page that are within the EVISA glossary will be marked if the user is switching the glossary feature on (on top of every page). Clicking the glossary link symbol at the ride side of a keyword will show you the entrance in the glossary explaining the term.
• Glossary cross-referencer: Selecting a single term within the glossary will activate the glossary cross-referencer that informs about the occurrence of the term within the EVISA web portal.
  
• Scientist cross-referencer: Selecting a scientist from the Directory of scientist will show also the occurence of the scientists on other pages of the EVISA web portal.
  
• Bookmarking: All pages of the EVISA web portal including the results from any search can be bookmarked by using the given URL.
• Advanced Search Engine: The whole EVISA data centre is indexed by our own advanced search engine. This tool allows to search in all types of content (including the databases) simultaneously, but can also be restricted to special sections of the data centre. You can even select the EVISA search engine into your browser search tools. 
  
• Web 2: Entries of the user into database search fields will be compared with existing keywords while the user is typing. The server will propose matching keywords for the entries made by the user.
• Comments: News and summary reports can be commented. We invite all the members of our user community to share their thoughts with us.
  

Recognition of EVISA's web portal

The EVISA web portal is currently visited by more than 60,000 visitors per month and is also highly ranked by Google (6/10 October 2009). Many organizations do have a link to our webserver (see: Links to EVISA) recognizing the value of the information provided by EVISA.

The "Atomic Spectrometry Update"  (ASU) Board of the "Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry" that reviews the literature about speciation commented about the quality of the information provided by the EVISA web portal "While much of the material on the World Wide Web is of uncertain quality, the European Virtual Institute for Speciation Analysis (EVISA) (home page, http://www.speciation.net/) is an important source of information highlighting significant developments in the area and is also regularly updated"

 Chris F. Harrington, Robert Clough, Helle R. Hansen, Steve J. Hill, Spiros A. Pergantis and Julian F. Tyson, Atomic Spectrometry Update. Elemental speciation, J. Anal. At. Spectrom. , 24/8 (2009) 999-1025. DOI: 10.1039/b911133f


More information about this web portal can be found in the following chapters:
Third parties linking to EVISA
Scientific publications citing EVISA
Ongoing development of EVISA's web portal
User statistics of EVISA's web portal
 Development of the content of EVISA's data centre