1 Introduction
The document describes informally, i.e., in plain English, the
functionality (plus rather the purpose) of Coma, a tool to assist in the
distributed preparation, organization, and processing of a conference,
workshop, or similar event.
The rest of the document sketches the intention of the project, the
informal functionality etc. We are not explicit about specific technologies
or how to realize the task.
1.1 General purpose
Scientific conferences nowadays are in general prepared, advertised, and
managed via the web. In particular, part of the organization is done in a
``distributed'' and loosely coupled manner, i.e., the actors in the
organization work at various locations, time zones, etc.
At an rather abstract level, the goal is to allow a group of experts, to
collaborate to find an agreement in selecting from a set of contributions
to the conference.
1.2 Functionality
The tool assists the in organization scientific conferences; Conceptually
it offers a conference management service,1 i.e., it
supports the
-
set-up,
- web-advertisement,
- author management,
- reviewer managament
for a numer of conferences. The management is via the web. The tool is
required to run a ``standard platform'' using only ``standard software'' in
particular, the external clients (authors, reviewers) must be able to make
use of the tool without an extraordinary system of software requirements.
last generated January 6, 2005 (ŠPublic License)