Over the past 20 years the HEP community has developed and gravitated around an analysis ecosystem centered on ROOT. ROOT and its ecosystem both dominate HEP analysis and impact the full event processing chain, providing foundation libraries, I/O services etc. that have prevalence in the field.
The analysis tools landscape is however evolving in ways that can have a durable impact on the analysis ecosystem and a strong influence on the analysis and core software landscape a decade from now, a timescale currently in an intensive planning round with the HEP Software Foundation (HSF) Community White Paper process. Data intensive analysis is growing in importance in other sciences and in the wider world. Powerful tools and new development initiatives, both within our field and in the wider open source community, have emerged. Creative developers have an ever more powerful open source toolkit available and are applying it towards innovations that leverage both open source and the ROOT ecosystem. ROOT itself is approaching a major re-engineering with ROOT 7, leveraging the powerful evolution of C++, with a major overhaul in its interfaces as seen both by its users and by satellite tools in the ROOT ecosystem.
With these considerations we are organizing this open HEP software community workshop convened by the HSF to examine the analysis ecosystem, currently and in the future with a 5-10 year view. The workshop will be something of a retreat aimed at an inclusive building of consensus among developers, users, projects and their supporters in the HEP analysis ecosystem.
See the indico page.