The design and development of a web based research proposal submission and evaluation system

A web based system for enabling researchers to submit project proposals for evaluation and funding is presented in this paper. Key features are, (i) use of only (freeware) for development of the entire system (ii) provisions to submit and evaluate proposals from a wide variety of web browsers running on various platforms (iii) provisions to search for abstracts and gather information on proposals funded in the past (iv) secure access for a variety of user groups (v) provision to practise usage and (vi) support for integration of a voice response system. The system also supports data mining to enable users to extract the summary of patterns in the database. The system uses PHP-based web pages, driven by a suitable browser for the front end and a MySQL database server at the back end.