Dante: A proposal for an interactive data analysis tool for the VIRGO collaboration

Dante is an interactive data analysis environment proposed for the VIRGO co llaboration. It is based on Open-Scientist, an architecture written in C+and developed at LAL mainly for the High Energy Physics community. Its modu larity and openness guarantees an adaptability to the fast turnover of soft ware technologies. The architecture presents a hierarchical multi-package d ecomposition in which basic "user" packages (histogramming, fitting, algori thm toolboxes) are independent of facility packages (storage, visualization , command interpreter). The main functionalities of a, preliminary implemen tation of Dante are reviewed.