The Geometry Description Markup Language
摘要
Currently,a lot of effort is being put on designing complex detectors.A number of simulation and reconstruction frameworks and applications have been developed with the aim to make this job easier.A very important role in this activity is played by the geometry description of the detector apparatus layout and its working environment.However,no real common approach to represent geometry data is available and such data can be found in various forms starting from custom semi-structured text files,source code (C/C++/FORTRAN),to XML and database solutions.The XML(Extensible Markup Language)has proven to provide an interesting approach for describing detector geometries,with several different but incompatible XML-based solutions existing.Therefore,interoperability and geometry data exchange among different frameworks is not possible at present.This article introduces a markup language for geometry descriptions.Its aim is to define a common approach for sharing and exchanging of geometry description data.Its requirements and design have been driven by experience and user feedback from existing projects which have their geometry description in XML.