Abstract
In managing an academic conference, the program chair (PC) is required to deal with many repetitive administrative tasks such as: interaction with authors and program committee members (reviewers), paper collection, paper allocation, distributing the paper to the reviewers, collating, sorting and tabulating the evaluations, orchestrating the debate of controversial evaluation of some of the papers, making the final tabulation and preparing the notification and comments to the reviewers and authors. A number of web-based systems for automating the above tasks have been reviewed in [1]. Some of the systems are no longer supported. Most of these systems use script programming languages and CGI technology. However, Java Servlet technology has better performance. Most of this software requires some efforts to handle different situations. So, system administrators are required for set-up; a service offered by the commercialization of these systems. The user interface is non-existence in many systems especially for administration and requires running scripts. The Conference Management System (ConfSys) presented here is a entirely a Web-based system which provides facility for the Program chair(s) to set up the details for a meeting, allows authors to register and submit papers to the system on-line; records the topic of expertise of the members of the program committee members (reviewers); helps the PC by performing an automatic allocation of the submitted papers to the reviewers. The reviewers have a facility to bid in an auction for papers to review and later to download and review the assigned paper via the Internet. The ConfSys uses the DBLP database [2] in the automatic assignment of papers to avoid any conflict of interest and thus helps in the allocation of papers to the reviewers for a fair and impartial review of each paper.