  The CMS experiment will comprise several very large high resolution detectors
for physics. Each detector may be constructed of well over a million parts and
will be produced and assembled during the next decade by specialised centres
distributed world-wide. Each constituent part of each detector must be
accurately measured and tested locally prior to its ultimate assembly and
integration in the experimental area at CERN. The CRISTAL project (Concurrent
Repository and Information System for Tracking Assembly and production
Lifecycles) [1] aims to monitor and control the quality of the production and
assembly process to aid in optimising the performance of the physics detectors
and to reject unacceptable constituent parts as early as possible in the
construction lifecycle. During assembly CRISTAL will capture all the
information required for subsequent detector calibration. Distributed instances
of Object databases linked via CORBA [2] and with WWW/Java-based query
processing are the main technology aspects of CRISTAL.
