Development of a Bahraini open data web portal for investment industry

Bahrain encourages investment in several economic sectors. But, when seeking investment opportunities, investors, particularly, foreign investors, lack the access to an open, single, specialized, and collaborative source of information for investment opportunities. Niche open data web portals are special websites that satisfy specific markets by aggregating purposeful information from several sources and making it openly available to dedicated users. This study aims at developing a Bahraini investment open data portal to enhance the collaboration and effective information sharing between investors and the Bahraini investment sectors and enable decision-making by granting investors budget preferences and matching organizations, open statistical information in available investment sectors' projects. The research design was inspired by a waterfall system development life cycle (SDLC) methodology comprising of two phases and seven processes. Data collection is based on an interview with representatives of the ministry of industry and commerce, a systematic literature review (SLR) method, content analysis method, and two questionnaires. The interview assured problem existence and collected investor's contact details, while questionnaire 1 investigated the Bahraini investment ecosystem and collected user requirements. Questionnaire 2 evaluated the application's usability based on Nielsen heuristics. Empirically, findings revealed the existence of the problem, identified the requirements underpinning, informed development of a dynamic open web portal considering that 12 functional requirements were collected, analyzed, and documented while user interfaces and database records were designed, implemented, installed, tested, and evaluated demonstrating 65% of usability.