EventView - The Design Behind an Analysis Framework

The development of software used to process petabytes of data per year is an elaborate project. The complexity of the detector means components of very diverse nature are required to process the data and one needs well defined frameworks that are both flexible and maintainable. Modern programming architecture based on object-oriented component design supports desirable features of such frameworks. The principle has been applied in almost all sub-systems of ATLAS software and its robustness has benefited the collaboration. An implementation of such framework for physics analysis, however, did not exist before the work presented in this paper. As it turns out the realisation of object-oriented analysis framework is closely related to the design of the event data object. In this paper, we well review the design behind the analysis framework developed around a data class called ``EventView''. It is a highly integrated part of the ATLAS software framework and is now becoming a standard platform for physics analysis in the collaboration.