PDG workspace
| PI: | Juerg Beringer |
| Collaborators: | LBNL, PDG Group |
| website: | http://pdg.lbl.gov/ |
The Particle Data Group (PDG) is an international collaboration charged with summarizing Particle Physics, as well as related areas of Cosmology and Astrophysics. In 2008, the PDG consisted of 170 authors from 108 institutions in 20 countries. The summaries are published in even-numbered years as a now 1340-page book, the Review of Particle Physics. PDG distributes 16,000 copies of the book. The Review has been called the bible of particle physics; over the years, it has been cited in 30,000 papers. The review is also published and maintained as a fully hyper-linked web site. The computing infrastructure supporting the PDG was conceived and built in the late eighties and although it was modern for its time, it is no longer able to support the many participants in the review and the process of creating the review. We are working with the PDG group to research, design, and build a new interactive workspace that enables all the participants in the review process to collaborate and input data directly into the review infrastructure.
The PDG workspace is a flexible, multi-user workspace where PDG members and other review authors with differing roles can operate with a customized view of the Review of Particle Physics (RPP) database. The system must be produced and deployed in parallel with the existing production RPP system.
The PDG workspace is a production quality system that is modular and flexible, that uses industry standard frameworks rather than custom one-of-a-kind code, where it is easy to add new tools into the
framework, that applies best practices such as user centered design and standard usability metrics for interface evaluation, and that is designed for long-term maintainability.