Introduction

This wiki describes the CRISTAL description-driven system developed by CERN, CNRS and UWE. Originally designed for production tracking of components of the CMS ECAL detector of the LHC, it has since been generalized into a system which can track the history of any object. It does this by ensuring that all state changes of its objects (known as Items) are organized and recorded by following a defined lifecycle, generating annotated event data. As part of a description-driven system, these lifecycles and the data structures of the data they produce, are themselves stored as data, or 'descriptions'. These descriptions are also stored in Items, meaning that the evolution of the design and implementation of a CRISTAL domain application is also tracked, and it is relatively simple to build user-extensible systems, where users create their own descriptions.

For more detail, please see the Technical Introduction