The MacNuclide nuclear data environment

Advance in technology have produced intriguing tools that can be applied to problems in nuclear science. Information management in nuclear science is an example of how technology is not quickly exploited. The U.S. Department of Energy supports an extensive program to evaluate published nuclear properties and store them in an electronic data base. Much of the evaluation effort has focused on producing the journal Nuclear Data Sheets and the publication Table of Isotopes. Although the electronic data base can itself be a valuable source of information, the software used to access is was designed using decades-old technologies. The authors of this paper have developed a novel data-base management system for nuclear properties. The application is known as MacNuclide. It is a nuclear data-base environment that uses the highly interactive and intuitive windowing environmentsof desk-top computers. The environment is designed around that image of the chart of nuclides. Questions are posed to the data base by placing constraints on properties and defining collections of nuclides to be used in data-base seraches. Results are displayed either as a simple list of nuclides that meet the imposed constraints or as a color chart of nuclides