Metis Tutorial
This tutorial demonstrates how to use Metis to manage a non-trivial peer review process. Here is a description of the review process:
A digital library can receive submissions for one of four topic areas. For each topic area, there is a committee of three editors. Users upload submissions via a Web-based form. An administrator for the digital library processes the submission. The submission is then sent to the relevant committee and the editors decide which committee member will handle the submission. The selected editor finds a set of three reviewers and gives each one a deadline for completing their review. If the deadline expires for a reviewer, the editor sends them a reminder and sets a new deadline. Once all reviews have been received, the editor determines the status of the paper and informs the author. If the paper was accepted, the administrator moves the paper to its final home in the collection. In addition, even though the administrator's work is situated at the beginning and end of this process, the administrator would like to be notified of all events that occur in between.
For the purposes of presentation, the above workflow is simplified to have only one reviewer, rather than three, and only one of the required four subcommittees will be created.
Step 0: Initialization
Before performing the steps below, make sure that Metis has been installed and deployed to an active Tomcat servlet engine. (See the INSTALL file of the Metis release for instructions.)
You have two options for completing the tutorial. You can use the editors provided by the Web-based version of Metis to complete the first four steps of the tutorial. Or, you may use the GUI-based version of Metis to complete the first four steps of the tutorial and then switch to the Web-based version of Metis to execute the workflows in Step 6 of the tutorial. (See the INSTALL file for instructions on configuring and launching the GUI-based version of Metis.)
Steps 1 through 4 of the tutorial come in two versions: "web" and "gui". The navigation bar on the left-hand side of the Metis website will take you to the "web" version of the first four steps. Simply click on the appropriate link (located at the top of page) to switch to the "gui" version.
Once you have the home page of the Metis workflow system loaded in your Web browser or you have launched the GUI-based version of Metis, you are ready to begin!