October 2002 - Nr. 10
Germany’s "Portal of Portals" Goes Live
TWIG - Looking for business partners in Germany? Want to know trade show dates in Cologne, or DAX quotes from Frankfurt? How about directions to the nearest gym, concert hall or museum from your hotel on your next trip to Munich? Need to know which pharmacies are open late in Berlin? Want to find out how to finance your research project in Heidelberg? The answers to all these questions and thousands more became available Tuesday (September 17), when, with the flick of a switch from his official residence in Berlin, Federal President Johannes Rau launched Germany’s premier independent Web portal.
The site, www.deutschland.de, is being billed as Germany’s first official Internet address, offering comprehensive information in five languages: German, English, French, Spanish and Russian. The portal gives users well-designed and easy-to-use search functions for access to annotated links and resources on business, science, scholarship, government, tourism, sports and culture in Germany. All links are noncommercial and free of advertising, and are vetted by an independent editorial staff and approved by an independent advisory board. In choosing the links to be posted for the portal, the "quality not quantity" principle applies; the number of links will be capped at 2,000. User-friendliness is an equally important criterion for selection.
State secretary Uwe-Karsten Heye, head of the German government’s press and information office, which initiated the project, stressed the portal’s editorial independence and the role of the separate advisory board as evidence of its remove from political influence. The portal is meant to give a true picture of the Federal Republic as an open-minded, tolerant, polyglot country, Heye said, a country that shares its technological, scientific and economic success with the world.
ARGE Deutschland.de, a consortium made up of Ponton Lab GmbH of Hannover and T-Systems International (a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom) of Frankfurt, as well as numerous cultural, media, foreign relations, and federal and state government institutions, were involved in developing and realizing the project.
Those interested in applying to have their organization’s website included on the portal can visit www.deutschland.de and click on Linkbewerbung (in German only).
