Congress Online
News of the month
Scientific Programme "2.0"
In the forefront of this year's DGPPN Congress (German Society for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Neurology, 
www.dgppn-kongress.de), extensive innovations regarding the employed congress information system CO CONGRESS ONLINE® were implemented.
Especially the online presentation of the Scientific Programme was extended with functionalities to offer greater convenience to the the congress participants and to enable a better interaction between the scientists.
Innovation 1: The recommendation system
"How come I am presented suggestions when buying books or shirts, but not when I am searching for important scientific information?"
This idea engaged GLOBIT GmbH's developers, in order to offer congress participants a better orientation when browsing the online Scientific Programme of a congress website.
Such a programme naturally is a very complex source of information, due to the large number of events during a congress, although there are very helpful features already, such as the structuring by days, session types or topics and a full text search engine.
So how can interested participants gain a better overview over the programme and the available infomation?
The answer lies in the CO CONGRESS ONLINE® recommendation system: whenever a certain session or a single abstract is viewed by a congress participant, this is logged by the servers at GLOBIT's control centre.
From the number of pageviews per session / abstract, a ranking list is computetd. A participant viewing a certain session / abstract is displayed a set of further recommendations on the basis of this ranking list:
The ranking list answers the question: "which contributions were especially paid attention by my colleagues, who have similar interests to mine?“
Innovation 2: The Discussion Forum
This year, all sessions of the Scientific Programme are directly linked to the discussion forum for the first time.
The forum offers participants a platform for exchange on the various scientific topics even weeks ahead of the congress.
All congress participants and visitors of the congress website are invited to actively join the discussions, express questions, or explain about current findings.
The forum is easy to understand and use even for rather unexperienced users. It is structured according to the existing session types, in order to overview the topics and to enable structured, purposeful discussions.
Following the link to one session type, the already started discussions and contributions are displayed. These can be read by any website visitor. To be able to write own contributions, a CO CONGRESS ONLINE® user account is necessary. This account is created e.g. during congress registration or abstract submission, but it is also possible to create an account free of charge without a congress registration for the usage of the forum.
Well-known symbols, a clear labelling and significant help texts support participants in lively exchanging knowledge and opinions before the congress actually starts.
Get to know the CO CONGRESS ONLINE® innovations at www.dgppn-kongress.de
Marcus Delp, Jenifer Cappel