  The CRISTAL (Cooperating Repositories and an Information System for Tracking
Assembly Lifecycles) project is delivering a software system to facilitate the
management of the engineering data collected at each stage of production of
CMS. CRISTAL captures all the physical characteristics of CMS components as
each sub-detector is tested and assembled. These data are retained for later
use in areas such as detector slow control, calibration and maintenance.
CRISTAL must, therefore, support different views onto its data dependent on the
role of the user. These data viewpoints are investigated in this paper. In the
recent past two CMS Notes have been written about CRISTAL. The first note, CMS
1996/003, detailed the requirements for CRISTAL, its relationship to other CMS
software, its objectives and reviewed the technology on which it would be
based. CMS 1997/104 explained some important design concepts on which CRISTAL
is and showed how CRISTAL integrated the domains of product data man- agement
and workflow management. This note explains, through the use of diagrams, how
CRISTAL can be established for detector production and used as the information
source for analyses, such as calibration and slow controls, carried out by
physicists. The reader should consult the earlier CMS Notes and conference
papers for technical detail on CRISTAL - this note concentrates on issues
surrounding the practical use of the CRISTAL software.
