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Case Study
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| Introduction | Documents | Exemples | Contacts | Software |
The objective of this case study is to model the requirements for the organization of scientific conferences.
Each year, many international conferences are organized to bring together researchers working on a given topic. The organisation of such event is a difficult task. Researchers usually do not have support from third parties. The organization of a large conference represents a tremendous amount of additional work. The process is particularily complex since it may involve the participation of hundreds of researchers spread all around the world. For instance, a researcher may submit a paper, while others may act as rewievers, conference organizers, etc. Until the recent years the whole process was performed without any kind of automation. Communication beetween researchers relied on (surface) mail, at least for the submission of papers and the review process. This was slow and very costly. The number of conferences organized each year is strongly increasing and there is a strong need to simplify the organization of conferences. At the same time, the generalization of internet makes it possible to automate the communication part thanks to technologies such as email and the www.
Actually, the organization of conferences is not a traditional "classroom" case study. Many researchers around the planet have tried to solve this problem, but there is currently no software supporting the whole process. So this is still an open problem. Many software products have been proposed in the last decade. In 1999, Snodgrass conducted a survey in the context the ACM (with IEEE this is one of the most important international organizations). In this survey, 20 software products were listed. Some of them were developed in the context of a particular conference. All these software focus on a particular part of the process, mostly the submission and review step. Only a few systems seems to be maintained and are still in used. These systems are usually freely available, but they could be quite difficult to install, to configure and to administrate. Interestingly, the development of one of these systems, CyberChair, have led to the creation of a small company named Borbala offering services for the configuration and administration of CyberChair. This shows that the problem described here do not only lead to software, but also to business. While different software products are available, there is plenty of room for improvement. Other business model could be invented.
The survey ftom the ACM is now out of date. We are not aware of any recent survey. Morevever, as far as we know there is currently no UML description of the requirements for the organisation of conference. The goal of this case study is to fill this gap.
This case study has been used in the context of the UFRIMA since 1998 in Departement of Computer Science of the University of Grenoble:
The case study takes different forms depending on the level of the students, the time available, etc.
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| Gestion de Conférences | This two-page document contains an informal description of
the problem to be solved. It was written a few years ago as a description
of initial requirements in the context of a case study at the University
of Grenoble. As any other document in natural language, it
contains ambiguities, fuzzy information and it is sometimes even slightly
inconsistent. However, this kind of document could be representative of
the level information provided when starting a new project. The goal of
the case study is to work on that type of informal requirements, making
clarification and formalizing requirements.
This document is available in the following formats: html PDF rtf |
| CyberDiffusion | The conference system could be extented to support electronic diffusion of papers by means of subscriptions. This document is derived from the exam DESS CCI-01-02. It contains the informal description of some additional requirements, some questions and some elements of the corresponding solutions. |
| Controle Continu DESS GI 02-03 | Definition of some home work to be performed by groups os six students (DESS GI-02-03) |
| Controle Continu DESS CCI 00-01 | Definition of some home work to be performed by groups of four students (DESS CCI-00-01) |
http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~oscar/Champion/champion.html
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| Analyse des besoins à l'aide d'UML: Document enseignants | This document is for teachers. It propose a possible
scenario made of 7 x 1h30 focusing on requirement analysis using UML.
This scenario is based on the software engineering course given at the
University of Grenoble in the UFRIMA departement : DESS
CCI, Cours Ingénierie du logiciel.
This document is available in the following formats: html et pdf |
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A huge amount of information is available on the web. This provide actual data samples for this case study. Below some examples of conferences.
| Call for Submission | CSMR02 |
| Call for Participation | CSMR02 |
| Programme | CSMR02 |
| Conference web sites | CSMR02 CSMR03 |
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| MyReview | University Paris-Sud Orsay France |
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One of the last conference system announced (http://myreview.lri.fr/). Freely available. With a demo online. |
| CyberChair | University of Twente ( / Borbala.com) Netherlands |
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CyberChair is a free software (www.cyberchair.org)
initially developed in the context of the University of Twente. Borbala is
a company later created by the author of CyberChair. This company provides
services based on CyberChairPro (http://www.borbala.com/). Recommended sources of information :
An another source of information, in french, is the description of a case study used at the University of Nantes (France). This description of requirements is mostly based on CyberChair. Cyberchair software can also be downloaded, but to install it a Python platform is required.
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| Paperdyne | Paperdyne.com |
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Successor of ChairWare. This system
looks very intersting and very promizing. Could be a strong competitor of
cyberchair in the future. A very good demo is available. It enables the user to connect to the system playing the role of different actors. Host the submission tool with complete support on their servers. |
| ConfMan | University of Oslo Norway |
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ConfMan is a free software developed at the University of
Oslo: http://confman.unik.no/~confman/ConfMan/
Recommended sources of information :
You can also consult
ConfMan software can also be downloaded, but to install it a mSql database is required as well as perl and a running web server.
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| WitanWeb | National Research Council Canada |
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http://witanweb.iit.nrc.ca/
Recommended sources of information:
The software is being completly rewritten using J2EE technology.
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| Openconf | Zakaon Group | http://www.zakongroup.com/technology/openconf.shtml
Not evaluated yet |
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| OCS | University of British Columbia | http://pkp.ubc.ca/ocs/ | |
| Puma | University of Cornell USA |
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http://www.cs.cornell.edu/database/predator/puma/
The demo link is broken. |
| Start | University of Maryland USA |
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http://www.cs.umd.edu/~rich/start.html
Recommended sources of information: No demo available (the link from the main page is broken).
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| CMT | Microsoft Research |
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Not evaluated yet |
| Wimpe | Dartmuth College UK |
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~nicol/wimpe/wimpe.html
Recommended sources of information :
No demo available. No screen captures. Wimpe software can be downloaded, but to install it different tools are required: tcl/tk, perl, a web server, etc.
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| EDAS | University of columbia USA |
Some documentation is available from http://edas.info/doc. The system is maintained and can be downloaded freely though there is no free support. Paying users (and users that contribute back fixes and enhancements) get support. A demo is available from a user/author perspective but a (free) registration is first required. There is also a mailing list (also requires a free registration). |
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| BYU |
BYU |
http://dagwood.cs.byu.edu/PaperReview/ | |
| WCMT | SourceForge | http://sourceforge.net/projects/wcmt |
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| Borbala | Borbala.com Netherlands |
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Borbala (http://www.borbala.com/)
is
a company later created by the author of CyberChair (www.cyberchair.org). This company provides
services based on CyberChairPro
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| Paperdyne | Paperdyne.com |
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The organisation of scientific conferences is/was used as a case study in differents university around the world, mostly to teach requirements analysis. This could be explained by the fact that most people in university have a good knowledge of the process. This process is actually a very good representant of information and collaborative system. All modern technologies can be used in this context. This is an actual problem that continuously evolves.
| Chairware | University of Swinburne Australia University of Dortmund |
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http://www.chairware.org/
Chaiware is collaborative project between the Uninveristy of Swinburne (Australia)
and the University of Dotrmund (Germany). It is a distributed classroom
exercice. The goal was to produce a running system based on Entreprise
JavaBeans. Most of the links on http://www.chairware.org/
are broken.
The page hosted by the german university is http://www-chair-ware.de. Most information is in german. A very useful source of information is the paper reporting on this experience :"Requirements Analysis in Distributed Software Engineering Education – An Experience Report". "In March 2001, two student teams, one in Melbourne, Australia, and one in Dortmund, Germany, started a common software engineering project to develop an electronic management tool for the support of scientific conferences. Both teams had to take part in all key activities of this project. The different deliverables had to be matched periodically in order to ensure the development of a common tool. In doing so, the teams had to deal with typical communication problems caused by different time zones, geographical distribution, language issues, and different approaches to requirements analysis.This paper presents the experiences and the lessons learned during requirements elicitation in the context of a distributed software engineering education project."
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| Exo2 | University of Nantes France |
The organisation of conferences is also used as a case study
at the University of Nantes. The intial description of the requriements is
described in this document http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/info/lrsg/Enseignement/UML_par_l_exemple/Exo2.htm
and is mostly based on CyberChait soiftware.
There is a very good set of case studies for teaching UML on the site
of J. Bézivin from the University of Nantes. The organisation of
conferences is one of these case studies. |
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| P25 Portail | ENST Bretagne France |
http://projet-ingenieur.enst-bretagne.fr/2000-2001/p25.html |
