Educated in Physics at Carnegie Mellon University and Cornell University, I have worked as a physicist for many years and done a number of projects at Fermilab. Some of the projects and my years of involvement are listed below along with a short description. Please follow the links (which generally go off to remote sites not directly affiliated with this web site) for more information.
Back To: The Web Site of David J. Ritchie
The SVXII is part of the Run II upgrade for the Silicon VerteXt detector which is at the heart of the Collider Detector Facility at Fermilab. It's purpose is to detect tracks of sub-atomic particles which originate in proton-anti-proton collisions produced by the Fermilab accelerator.
To keep track of the many components, sub-assemblies, and assemblies that make up the SVXII, we are taking a Product Data Management (PDM) approach as is often done by manufactures of other complex products. The CDF SVXII Assembly Tracking Database Project is the on-going effort to implement this in an R&D environment where new developments and understandings of component characteristics often change the assembly procedures over a very short time period.
A document concerning SVXII and Matrix, the chosen commercial PDM product, describes in overview fashion the approach.
The MISCOMP Project is an initiative begun in 1991 by the Fermilab Computing Division to "re-engineer" its business systems so as to provide a modern, coherent, and comprehensive infrastructure whereby the Division could track its activities, the use of its resources, etc.
One of the basic themes of this effort was to plan that technological change would be a basic feature of the business systems landscape for the foreseeable future. The approach therefore was to construct an underlying model of the Division's activities with sufficient generality so as to be widely applicable within the Division. Then, databases, database applications, and procedures were developed, using commercial, off the shelf, products–either as underpinings or in direct service–to implement the model within various centers of business activities within the Division.
As confirmation of the theme, in the middle of the project, the web hit. While the underlying model has remained the same, most of the applications have become web-based in the later years of the project.
In the document management area, one of the commerical products chosen was Matrix. The presentation Matrix Implementation at Fermilab describes the plans for the use of this product in the tracking of documents associated with purchase requisitions at the beginning of the effort. The implementation has since been accomplished and uses Matrix in connection with the Division's other underlying Oracle databases to track the approval of purchase requisitions, their contribution to the execution of the Division's budget, and manages the hand-off of the information to other laboratory business systems.
The web began its infiltration into Fermilab in 1992-1993 leading to the need for a laboratory home page in early 1994. I chaired the working group which developed the laboratory's home page and became the laboratory's first webmaster. My association with the Fermilab Library which came out of an earlier project to automate the library resulted in my helping the library to move into the age of the web. Those experiences were summarized in a paper co-authored with the Fermilab Head Librarian that was submitted to the first Austrlian World Wide Web conference and titled The Librarian and the Webmaster.
Back To: The Web Site of David J. Ritchie
hits since 1998/07/01.