Electronic Submission, Managing and Approval of Grant Proposals at the German Research Foundation based on Standard Internet and Office Tools

Today, grant proposals submitted to the German Research Foundation (DFG) are paper documents. They are received by ordinary mail, manually entered into a proprietary software system and, finally, information relevant to the specific task is extracted manually and sent to other departments involved in the reviewing/approval process. Of course, all these activities are purely hard-copy based. This paper gives a first report on a research project “GoldenGate” which focuses on the development of a prototype system for a complete electronic workflow including submission, managing and approval of applications for research funding at the DFG. Typically one would use one of the available Information/Workflow Management Systems, but after careful consideration we made the decision to use a set of standard software tools and formats (i.e. Hyperwave Information Server, MS Office’97, XML) as the key components of our new system and combine them with minimal but flexible interfaces. These ideas, the situation at the DFG, technical details of our present implementation and preliminary results are presented in this paper. Category: H.4.1, H.5.3