The Glance Project

Overview

The Glance Project is a powerful yet easy to use search engine for the Atlas Collaboration.

The ATLAS Database stores a huge amount of data about the ATLAS contruction. Retrieving data from the database is a very dificult problem, since that there is no way to define a generic data structure that meets every needs. In the other hand, it is not a good solution to force people to make his own program for information retrieval.

The Glance Project offers a parametric search according to the kind of document being searched. The description for each document type is described in XML, and is used to generate a search interface on-the-fly. Additionally, the Glance Project offers a way to automatically generate the XML description for the tables on a database and to edit these files in a user friendly way.

Why using Glance?

Some benefits of the project are:

Web Interface - All you need to have is a web browser. No need to download anything.
Adaptive Search Interface - Each table (or group of related tables) has its own search interface, so you can control exactly what you are searching for.
Precise Results - The comparison operators changes according to the type of the field being searched. This allows you to specify better search criterias, narrowing the results to the meaningful ones.
No coding - There is no need to code a new interface for each new table. The project automatically generates the interface for a given table, so you are always a few clicks away from your new Search Interface.
Flexibility - If you really want you can always edit the XML description of each Search Interface to fine-tune it to your needs.

How to use Glance

The current version of the Glance Project is accessible here. It currently browses data from CERN's pdb01 Oracle cluster, as well as several other databases, such as MTF. If you can't see your tables from Glance, please make sure that the user ATLASINTEGRATION_READER has select privilege on your tables.

Please take a look at the Development Status page for the latest news about the project development.

TWiki for list of activities: Glance Activities