Designing a document-centric coordination application over the Internet

In this paper we describe an experience in designing a groupware applicatio n distributed over the WWW to solve a conference management problem. The sy stem we design coordinates the activities of several people engaged in revi ewing and selecting papers submitted for a scientific conference. We discus s why such an application is interesting and describe how we designed it. T he architecture we suggest implements what we call an active Web, because i t includes entities which we are able to use and provide services offered t hrough WWW infrastructures. Users, agents, and active documents can interop erate using a set of basic services for communication and synchronization. The active Web infrastructure we describe here is based on coordination tec hnology integrated with Java. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights res erved.