What is Anaphe?

The goal of the Anaphe project is to provide a complete set of HEP-specific libraries and tools for data analysis and visualisation.

The package consists of a set of foundation libraries and a set of thin "wrappers" which implement the interfaces using functionality from the foundation libs. In turn, some of the foundation libs rely on functionality from a lower layer. This lower layer includes free commercial software (e.g. Qt), expensive commercial software (e.g. Objectivity/DB), older CERN software (e.g. HBOOK) and software provided by other projects (e.g. CLHEP).

Since July 2001, we have also provided an interactive analysis and visualisation tool called Lizard, which provides a flexible Python-based framework which can be fully configured at run-time to load whichever Anaphe libraries you want, plus other user-defined or third-party modules.

In some cases the interfaces are implemented in two or more alternative wrappers. For example, persistent storage of histograms can be done using Objectivity, HBOOK or XML; more implementations are possible and some are already forseen (e.g. ROOT files). This flexibility arises from carefully designing the software to be extremely loosely coupled ('modular'). The timescale of the LHC project is very long. During that time software and even programming languages will change or disappear to be replaced by something new. Modularity allows us to adapt incrementally and gradually to inevitable change.

Important information concerning Anaphe and AIDA