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GCN Home > 10/11/04 issue

Aligning the planets

By Wilson P. Dizard III, GCN Staff

NASA wants all its Web sites to orbit the space agency's portal

As the sun holds the planets in orbit at different speeds and distances, NASA wants to make its portal the axis for more than 170 disparate Web sites.

The new NASA Public Web Site Integration Plan sets the principles and standards the space agency will use to weave and link the sites to the central portal at www.NASA.gov.

The effort will consolidate many of the agency’s Web sites and pages through the portal and provide standards for the presentation of all pages, even those that NASA opts not to integrate with the portal. NASA officials want to improve the way the agency maintains its Web presence while also making its online services more productive for Web site visitors.

“We’ve been challenged to look across all our functions to identify opportunities to provide better information to the public and create more internal efficiencies,” NASA CIO Pat Dunnington said.

The integration plan mandates standards for the multiple audiences that NASA serves, including the general public, children, educators, scientists and researchers, its employees and the media. The plan also defines the responsibilities of the portal’s Editorial Board, which oversees about 8,500 Web pages.

Alongside NASA’s plan for managing the portal’s content is an enterprise architecture that defines six possible levels of integration between any given site and the portal:
  • Full portal integration
  • Parallel integration
  • Partial integration
  • User-interactive application hosting
  • Web development application hosting
  • No integration.
“Many people think the enterprise architecture is a tool to drive centralization,” Dunnington said. “That is not the case. It is a tool that allows you to make the right decisions based on business needs.”

NASA is carrying out the integration project with help from eTouch Systems Corp. of Fremont, Calif. The agency’s component organizations are contributing funding to the effort, and personnel and contractors working across the agency will also help with integration projects.

“If the site owner’s resources are available, eTouch’s services are at a minimum,” said Nitin Naik, NASA’s associate chief technology officer.

NASA has defined a series of milestones for the portal overhaul. Naik said it is on track to reach one of them, the integration of its field sites, by the end of next month.