Abstract:

High energy collider data in their raw form are useless to physicists outside the experiment -- the interpretation of those data requires an intimate knowledge of the detector and its foibles. This presents a serious problem to an experiment wishing to preserve its data for future analysis.

The DZero collaboration has found that it is possible to "package" this intimate knowledge into a web-based interface (Quaero) that allows any high energy physicist to perform an analysis on a subset of the data collected in Run I of the Fermilab Tevatron. I will describe the key enabling ideas, and will show the results of several Quaero analyses.