Hub

1) A large retailer or manufacturer having many trading partners. 2) A reference for a transportation network as a “hub and spoke” which is common in the airline and trucking industry. For example, a hub airport serves as the focal point for the origin and termination of long-distance flights where flights from outlying areas are fed into the hub airport for connecting flights. 3) A common connection point for devices in a network. 4) A web “hub” is one of the initial names for what is now known as a “portal.” It came from the creative idea of producing a web site which would contain many different “portal spots” (small boxes that looked like ads with links to different, yet related content). This content, combined with Internet technology, made the idea a milestone in the development and appearance of web sites, primarily due to the ability to display a lot of useful content and store one’s preferred information on a secured server. The web term “hub” was replaced with portal.