Water Portals or Gateways

The Internet has been inundated with new gateways and portals on water over the last couple of years. De Jong, D. et al. (2003) define a water portal as a one-stop, client-oriented web site that offers visitors a broad array of interactive resources such as news, data bases, discussion forums, search options, space to collaborate online and links on water-related topics (7).

A selection of portals or at least sites that claim to be a portal, which are relevant for the water and sanitation sector are available. The web sites are divided into:

• Water supply and sanitation
• Water – general
• Water resources
• Other languages, multilingual
• Commercial

Portals and subject gateways will be a good starting point (8) for:

• topics that are easily classified, i.e. looking for a government water department web site vs. looking for an article on sector wide approaches
• a topic that falls into a thematic area which is covered by a subject directory, i.e. ecological sanitation is a topic in the Sanitation Connection Portal
• new information on a specific topic.