Abstract.-Online biodiversity portals and databases enabling access to large volumes of biological information represent a potentially extensive set of resources for a variety of user groups. However, in order for these resources to live up to their promise they need to be demonstrably useful to the communities they are intended to serve. We discuss a number of principles that can be applied to portal development that assist in defining the scope of user communities, determining their requirements within the context of the data available and establishing realistic goals for a portal or portal development tools. We highlight a lack of user involvement and formalised requirements analysis in biodiversity portal projects to date, and compare this with a similar project in the Astrophysics community. It is concluded that the poor understanding of both the users and their tasks that arises from this lack of analysis makes it difficult to assess the success of a portal and increases the risk of the portal being judged to have failed. We suggest that a change in the way large biodiversity portal projects are managed, presented and funded could lead to an increased perception of success with minimal change in the underlying infrastructure, yet enhancing the life expectancy of such projects.

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In the business world, financial institutions, like banks and investment firms, heavily rely on technology to manipulate daily operations and support business. Many more business processes have now become automated and require procedures to be approved. For example, when providing business services liked personal / corporate loans, mortgage, or Letter of Credit (LC), a customer is required to submit information within their applications; whereas, the service provider has to perform complicated approval procedures, involving different departments or even external parties. In this paper, we discuss how a Credit Approval System (CAS) handles the workflow of such business processes. The system is extensible to contemporary technologies including Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), and Java Server Face (JSF) in order to coordinate related parties through the Internet as well as to facilitate the operations and communications with different levels of staff in the Intranet. Our experiences and design characteristics will be further implemented into a system designed for a global financial firm. IEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering978-0-7695-3842-6/09 $26.00