The origins of the words "port" and "starboard" may be useful to consider here. Early ships did not have a rudder built into the hull, but instead used a modified oar - or later, a larger and more sophisticated steering-board - positioned at the helmsman's right hand. To prevent damage to these devices, the opposite side of the ship had to be moored to the wharf, hence "port side" and "steer board side". A certain amount of lexical drift resulted in "starboard" for the latter.
The practical upshot is that port and starboard are synonyms for left and right respectively in the direction of travel. So they only make sense for a vessel which has reasonably consistent "forward" and "up" vectors.
The ISS, even though it is a space station existing in microgravity, is such a vessel:
Nominally, the ISS flies in an LVLH (Local Vertical Local Horizontal) attitude. That means that the vehicle pitches at four-degrees-per-minute in order to keep its belly pointed towards the Earth. So, nominally, the orientation of the ISS appears rather consistent with respect to the Earth.
This is desired because the vehicle was designed to be in an attitude in which the comm antennae pointed up at the TDRSS, the GPS antennae point up at the GPS satellites, the thickest shielding is in the direction of greatest debris damage risk, the windows point towards Earth for Earth observation science, and other external payloads can point at their desired topic, consistently.
<PERSON>, NASA
However, this would not be true of a wheel-type or cylinder-type rotating space station, whose gyroscopic properties would keep it pointed along a consistent axis instead of in "local attitude" - unless the axis of rotation happened to be aligned with the plane of orbit. 947
That would actually be a reasonable orientation for a wheel-type station, but not for an O'Neill cylinder which must keep its axis pointed towards the local sun.
A far more reasonable organisation for both types would be compass directions. As seen from above the North Pole, the Earth rotates anticlockwise, resulting in the Sun appearing to rise in the East. Analogous definitions result in natural N/S/E/W directions in a rotating wheel or cylinder. Up and down would be reversed relative to a rotating planet (ie. up is inwards), due to the direction of apparent gravity.
Note however that a common design for <PERSON> cylinders is as a pair, rotating in opposite directions, so that the common axis can be precessed to follow the sun through its orbit. In such a design, north and south would be at opposite ends in each cylinder, so would not be useful for locating external non-rotating parts of the station (though residents probably wouldn't care). In such cases, an additional set of directions based on the "hot" and "cold" ends may prove helpful. 15