Development of a web-based conference management system using SOFL

Currently, there are several systems in use to support paper submissions to academic conferences, but they still require program chairs to spend a lot of time in organizing paper reviewing. To further improve the situation and reduce the burden of the chairs, a completely automatic reviewing system is desirable. Our research presented in this paper is part of the effort toward realizing such an automatic system. Specifically, we focus on two functions of the entire system, which manage paper assignments to referees and paper evaluations based on the feedback from the referees. To ensure the quality of the system, we adopt the Structured Object-oriented Formal Language (SOFL) for the requirements analysis and design. In this paper, we describe how the requirements are analyzed through writing an informal specification and then refining it into a semi-formal specification. We also discuss how the design is carried out by constructing a formal specification in SOFL. Finally, we present the implementation and testing details on our system.