ATLAS's one-stop shop

13 January 2010

A screenshot of the ATLAS Now site



It’s the start of a new year, and while ATLAS gets ready to explore new frontiers, it seems fitting that since January 12th there is also a new suite of sleek and streamlined Collaboration pages dedicated to helping us all keep up with the latest.

If only the existing Collaboration pages had been designed and deliberated over in as much detail as the detector itself! New links were constantly being tacked on and old un-used links remained cluttering up the page, drowning the original organisational structure. Not only that; the structure of the Collaboration itself had evolved.

“It was really time to re-style the page,” says Manuela Cirilli, of the ATLAS Support Office, who took on the project along with Kathy Pommes. Where before, meetings and documents were the most prominent feature on the main page, the switch to data-taking meant that a change of perspective was in order: “The organisation for data-taking and its new focus is much better reflected now.”

The main page has quick links to the five main areas of ATLAS: Detector Operation, Trigger, Computing & Software, Data Preparation, and Physics. The rest of the page is arranged in space-efficient expandable boxes to save you scrolling for what you’re looking for. Here you’ll find meeting timetables (with various views to suit your needs), the latest news, physics results, official documentation and information, and useful tools like EVO and EDH. In short: It’s a one-stop shop for all your ATLAS needs.

Better still is the “ATLAS Now” tab.  Originally an idea from Fabiola Gianotti, who wanted a new page where all collaborators, including those from the most remote corners of the world, could see what’s going on in ATLAS at any moment in time, “ATLAS Now “ is a protected, strictly collaborator-only section of the site. Manuela describes  it as the “morning coffee page”: the place you can go to as soon as you get out of bed, wherever you are in the world, to see the latest from the experiment. It will stream ‘live’ information from all activities: Twitter-like news posted by ATLAS Management and Activities Coordinators; live feeds from Run Control, the Atlantis event display, and the LHC Operations page; and webcasts of current meetings or the Control Room – a handy alternative to EVO.

Beginning after the summer, Manuela and Kathy undertook a major re-design with supervision from ATLAS Technical Coordinator Marzio Nessi, and Kathy got busy with the HTML, implementing all their new ideas. Finally, a downtown web design company, Procab Studio, was brought in to polish the design off. Certain areas, such as ATLAS Now, working group areas, and unpublished results are locked to the public, protected by the NICE password system. Apart form anything else, this means that collaborators can communicate through the platform without getting hung up about being 100 per cent grammatically and politically correct.

“We went through quite some odyssey to get everything to work within the rather unique CERN web configuration,” says Manuela, “but with lots of help from some very nice people from IT we finally made it, though some hiccups are still to be expected when the Collaboration starts to access the website for real.”

“Thanks to the excellent work of Manuela, Kathy and the Support Office, an idea that we have been cherishing for some time has become reality,” says Fabiola.

 

Ceri Perkins

ATLAS e-News