Advances in Business Statistics, Methods and Data Collection

20Web Portals for Business Data Collection

Bente Hole¹ and Leanne Houben²

¹Statistics Norway, Kongsvinger, Norway

²Statistics Netherlands, Heerlen, The Netherlands

20.1 Introduction

With increasing digitalization and demands on reducing both response burden and cost, National Statistical Institutes (NSIs) are increasingly interested in portals for collecting business data. In this chapter we provide an overview of portal features and research results that can help NSIs understand the current state of web portals and provide inspiration for their future developments.

Initially, a web portal (or a portal website) was defined as “that part of a website which acts as a gateway, or launch point, through which users navigate the World Wide Web” (OECD 2002). Portals evolved from search engines by adding features and services so that today, a web portal is “a comprehensive internet resource system that provides information services” (Che and Ip 2018, p. 8). Portals not only revolutionized access to information and knowledge, they also support interaction between information users and information providers (see Lee et al. 2010). According to Fuangvut (2005), portals can be classified using different perspectives. We can distinguish between public portals that everyone can visit and private portals that include corporate and enterprise portals. From an information seeking perspective, horizontal portals provide the same offer to all users while vertical portals are user‐centric and tailor ...