Committee Members

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Committee (PC) members, collect the review results, send out notifications to the authors,announce the program (Call-for-Participation), and registration of participants. The advantages compared to traditional solutions like snail-mail or courier services are obvious: internet applications deliver information much faster, all information is available in a certain digital format, and at least so far, internet is much cheaper. Furthermore, the digital information can be used for further processing in other applications. For example, information about authors, reviewers2, and participants are often handled in the conference secretariat with an office application like Excel or Filemaker. Unfortunately, there are a lot of incompatibility problems related to different representations in different applications. Therefore, a lot of work still remains to be done by "hand" or by some ad hoc written scripts, e.g. Perl-Scripts or Shell-Scripts. However, this type of processing is known to be error-prone.

One insufficient aspect of today's solutions for conference organization is the missing integration and integrity control. The second main disadvantage is that PC members have to travel if they want to take part actively in the final selection process. Traditional system support like telephone conferences or video conferences is only helpful for a few discussion partners. However, PCs comprise often more than 15 members. Therefore, in many cases only PC members who live not far from the conference location participate in the final meeting and determine the conference program.

This initiated the idea to organize the PC meeting for DAIS'97 via WWW and resulted in the implementation of a major core element of ConfMan (Conference Manager), called OBSession. It is based on the public-domain relational database system (DBS) Mini SQL (mSQL) [5].

Review results, comments, and discussion arguments are stored in the DBS and can be retrieved during the discussion via WWW. The system was successfully applied for one of the first worldwide PC meetings via the WWW. 15 PC members from ten countries on four continents participated in that meeting. Another element of ConfMan is a WWW-based paper submission system which notifies automatically every paper submission by e-mail. ConfMan, first used for IDMS´98, integrates both elements to avoid "manual" transfer of data from one system to another and additionally supports further organization tasks, like handling registration of participants. ConfMan uses a WWW-based user interface and for certain tasks e-mail. For data management, mSQL is used to handle all organizational aspects starting from paper submission process, via review process and PC meeting, to author notification and registration of participants.

This paper describes design, implementation, and evaluation of ConfMan. We discuss two important contributions: first, the systems-oriented aspects, i.e., design, implementation, and performance evaluation of an advanced distributed application that combines DBS and internet technology. Second, we discuss human-factor-related aspects, i.e., general usability of the system. The reported experiences with using ConfMan for various conferences should be helpful for future conference organizations.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: we analyze the typical roles and tasks of entities during conference organization in Section 2. In Section 3, we describe the design and implementation of ConfMan. The functionality of ConfMan is described in Section 4. In Section 5, we evaluate ConfMan with respect to performance, reliability, security, and usability. Finally, we give an overview of related work in Section 6, and summarize the main contributions and give an outlook on future work in Section 7.