The WitanWeb - Conference Paper Management Software

Overview

WitanWeb system supports the on-line management of refereed submissions. Authors submit their proposals for consideration, referees provide reports on the proposals, and committee members make decisions as to the action to take on each proposal. All this is done in a collaborative fashion using a standard Web browser to access the system.

WitanWeb was designed to be highly configurable to handle many different kinds of organizations and processes. The system is organized around the following user roles.

• Authors provide submissions to be reviewed.
• Referees review the submissions and assess the quality of the submissions.
• Committees make decisions regarding what to do with the submissions.
• Administrators configure the conference and undertake the ongoing management and administration duties.

Some of the major features of WitanWeb include:

• Organization of the submissions into multiple tracks with separate committees and referees for each track.
• Policy based security declarations to prevent unauthorized access to information.
• Customized menus for users depending on their authorizations and work that has been assigned to them.
• Customized forms for gathering data from authors, referees, and committee members.
• Extensive configuration capability to handle different kinds of refereeing processes.

Technical summary

WitanWeb is developed to be compliant with the J2EE 1.3 standard and can be run on any platform that supports this standard. Persistent data and business processes are using Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 2.0. The presentation layer is built entirely around Java Server Pages 2.2. Use of a standard technology provides a number of advantages:

• The application can be configured to run on any J2EE compliant platform and use any JDBC compliant database for persistent storage. Current J2EE platforms include a wide range of both open-source and commercial offerings, giving a many options in terms of performance and scalability.
• User authentication is based on standard JAAS. Since this depends on plug-in modules that can be easily replaced, administrators can provide the type of registration and authentication appropriate for their site. This can include user self-registration with a simple forms based authentication, to more sophisticated and secure registrations, or integration with an existing user directory.
• The persistent objects within the database can be protected by policies to specify the access rights of different users. These policies can be used to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the different types of information within the system.
• A high degree of configurability to different refereeing processes can be achieved by modifying the JSP pages. These will eventually be distributed with a set of custom tags for tailoring the system.
• All textual information is kept in language resource bundles. The system can provide multilingual support with multiple language bundles.

Run a demo!

You can run a demo of the system by clicking here. The demo is configured as a conference with a single track. You can register using any username and password you want. The following users have already been registered and configured (passwords are the same as the usernames):

• The administrator (username admin) creates the different committees. There are two committees for this conference. The Program Committee is responsible for deciding which papers are accepted and rejected. The Referees are the set of users who are qualified to referee submissions.
• The Program Committee Chair (username PCC1)assigns the submissions to members of the Program Committee. The Chair can: Check the status of each submission to see the number of referee reports for each submission and whether the Program Committee Member has made a recommendation to accept or reject the submission; close the conference to new submissions; create different paper sets to hold the accepted and rejected papers; email the authors of the accepted and rejected papers, appending the appropriate sections of the referee reports.
• Program Committee Members (username PCM1 assigns submissions to referees and makes a recommendation to accept or reject the submission.
• Referees (username r1 submits referee reports on the submissions to which they have been assigned.
• Authors (username a1) provide submissions.

Any registered user can be an author and provide submissions for review.

• CASCON 2009