Portal Information Integration and Ownership Misfits: A Case Study in a Tourism Setting

Information portals are supposed to provide relevant and timely information to an intended target group. A challenge, however, is that the portal in it self does not have full information ownership, but relies on the content of its sub-domains. Poor information quality severely decreases the actual value of a portal, and the case described in this paper illustrates this problem. The Swedish Travel & Tourism Council provides an Internet portal that aims at being the easiest access point to the vast tourism offerings in Sweden. It could be seen as set of information services that tries to provide a simple taxonomy on top of several sub-sets of business-specific portals within tourism. The three-phase evolution of the site unmasks the core problem in portal information management, namely information ownership and clear business roles in the content provision process.