The project NOVA (net-based support for organisation, decision and preselection for selection processes) develops a web-based system to support selection processes at universities. This ranges from purely organisational aspects (completely electronic handling of pre-applications, communication support, address management, statistical evaluations) up to the determination of qualification (generic criteria for selection, automatical assessment of suitable aspects, creation of rankings, etc). The task is not just to develop suitable, intuitive user interfaces, but relevant security aspects and other legal restrictions must be observed.

A general question that arises in this context is how to exploit genericity, suitable parameterisation and flexible design to ensure that the system is easily adaptable, maintainable, extensible and portable requiring as little effort as possible. A major goal is to solve the problem of how to represent principles and rules of the selection process such that both a simple and intuitive management of the rules and the automatic generation of respective code is possible.