Speaker
Description
Joint Institute for Nuclear Research hosts more than 40 international conferences every year. Organization means providing information about the event, registration page, abstract submission, timetable creation, and other important information. To do that, the Indico system is used heavily.
Indico is open-source software for meetings organization developed and supported by CERN. One of the conference features is a book of abstracts. It is created before the beginning of a conference but after the abstract submission deadline. It consists of all titles, authors, affiliations, and emails given during the abstract submission process. The creation of such a book may be very tedious work. The book should be divided for sections, the order must be preserved withing sections, indices which represent authors' affiliation must be carefully set, etc. A good example of the usual problems are discrepancies in affiliation names.
Authors tend to name their institutes differently. For Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, more than 15 different variants exist. The system was developed to simplify and automatize the creation of a book of abstracts for conferences organized with Indico. An XML file with text information about all abstract exported from Indico and used to create DOCX file with the book of abstracts. Custom styles and special templates may be applied. The developed system: greatly speeds up the book of abstract creation, eliminates the possibility of typos in affiliation indices, brings attention to discrepancies like mixed language, too short/long abstract and others.
