The ClassAd language was originally developed by Wieru Cai, Miron Livny, and James Pryne as part of the Condor [2,7,8] project at the University of Wisconsin--Madison [10]. Under the leadership of Rajesh Raman, the language was made substantially more powerful (including such features as lists, arbitrary nesting of lists and records, and the Boolean, AbsTime and RelTime data types), while at the same time, the specification was made substantially simpler and more regular. In particular, the specification of the language was separated from details of its use in Condor. See Raman's Ph. D. dissertation [9] for a more readable introduction to the language and its design goals and a discussion of implementation issues, and a related conference paper [11] for a discussion of the use of ClassAds and Matchmaking in resource allocation. Raman is also the author of the current C++ implementation. Marvin Solomon is the author of the Java implementation.
Currently, the language is being maintained and developed by Alain Roy and Marvin Solomon, with input from other members of the Condor team. For the latest information about ClassAds, please see the ClassAd home page [1].