Michael Reibel, a geography professor at Cal Poly Pomona, wants to build a portal.Not the kind that brings you to the future or one that takes you into John Malkovich’s mind, but a Web portal, equipped with all kinds of Inland Empire information.
Just what kind of information?
“It could be the physical environment, the ecosystem, the social environment, housing you name it. All information to the region,” Reibel explained. “Information stored in a digital map, tables, numbers reports literally, everything.”
Everything is a lot of information for an area that stretches from San Dimas to Yucaipa but nobody said Reibel’s vision is fleeting.
The Regional Research Portal, now awaiting grant funding, will one day aid Inland Empire researchers such as urban demographers like Reibel. It will also be a space to find studies such as ones conducted by Cal Poly professors for Empire – a joint project with the Daily Bulletin and The Sun.
On Nov. 7, seminars on consumer sentiment, housing, logistics industry and other Inland Empire topics are scheduled for the Empire Symposium at Cal Poly Pomona. Articles about these issues are inside today’s Empire special section, the first of a three-part series.
There is ample research from universities and government agencies on the topics of the Empire articles but there isn’t an easy way to search for them.
A Web portal is essentially a door to the Internet that focuses specifically on this region and would be a way to access data for scientists, academics, policy makers or anybody interested.An Inland Empire Google, so to speak.
Reibel said this kind of regional portal would be the first of its kind. There are local portals, like city hall Web sites, and there are national government portals, said Reibel.
“It’s either too local or too big,” Reibel said. “This would be an in-between layer acting as intermediaries.”
Boykin Witherspoon, director of Cal Poly’s Center for Geographic Information Science Research, is contacting various agencies to gather content for the portal. If the project receives federal funding, an early version of the portal could be launched in the spring of 2009.
Witherspoon is building the computer structure for the portal. Once content is collected, an administrator would input the data to the portal.
For example, a researcher at UC Riverside who conducted studies on regional habitat could submit the information to the portal administrator. Anyone would be able to find it through the portal search engine or be notified if they signed up for a specific area of research.
Witherspoon said you currently have to know the information beforehand in order to find it on the Internet.
“It’s almost like you have to know there’s a professor in Riverside that does this kind of habitat mapping,” Witherspoon said. “A Google search wouldn’t find it.”
The creators think the portal could be a place where kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers might share lessons and develop ideas.
“We don’t want to own this thing. We want this to be owned by the people,” Reibel said. “There’s a big community piece to it.”
Article by By Wendy Leung, Staff Writer wendy.leung@dailybulletin.com
Originally The Daily Bulletin
