Glance Information System for ATLAS Management

ATLAS Experiment is an international collaboration where more than 37 countries, 172 institutes and laboratories, 2900 physicists, engineers, and computer scientists plus 700 students participate. The management of this teamwork involves several aspects such as institute contribution, employment records, members' appointment, authors' list, preparation and publication of papers and speakers nomination. Previously, most of the information was accessible by a limited group of people and the system used was not designed to handle new requirements easily. Moreover, developers had to face problems such as different terminology, diverse data modeling, heterogeneous databases and unlike users needs. Besides that, the maintenance has to be an easy task considering the long lifetime experiment and professionals turnover. The Glance system, a generic mechanism for accessing any database, acts as an intermediate layer isolating the user from the particularities of each database. It retrieves, inserts and updates the database independently of its technology and modeling. Relying on Glance, a group of systems were built to support the ATLAS management aspects: ATLAS Membership, ATLAS Appointments, ATLAS Speakers, ATLAS Analysis Follow-Up and ATLAS Conference Notes. This paper presents the overview of the Glance information system framework and describes the privilege mechanism developed to grant different level of access for each member and system. The performance of such approach will also be explained, showing the resultant decentralization of the ATLAS administrative activities and its benefits for the whole collaboration.