SISRS: The Superimposed Scholarly Review System

Reviewing scholarly work in electronic form (for example, in PDF) is becoming increasingly commonplace. Applications such as Adobe® Acrobat® and Microsoft® Word facilitate annotating, an important part of the review process, but they have some drawbacks. For example, they store annotation in the reviewed document, and they provide poor query capability. The Superimposed Scholarly Review System (SISRS) addresses these drawbacks. It superimposes reviews and leaves source documents unchanged. It uses a common user interface over heterogeneous document types and it integrates into host applications such as Acrobat and Word. It allows aggregation of comments by multiple reviewers, and querying of comments and commented regions together. It even allows multiple simultaneous organizations for a review. In addition to demonstrating an alternative means of scholarly review, SISRS demonstrates some of the benefits of superimposed information and queries over bi- level information. SISRS is built using SPARCE, a middleware architecture for superimposed information management.