Spime Watch: tweeting the lab

*Scientific lab automation of "lab notebooks." Note web-semantic problems with cognitive loading, verbs, procedures and nouns.

http://cameronneylon.net/blog/tweeting-the-lab/

(...)

"In our blog based notebook we use a one item-one post approach where every research artifact gets its own URL. Both the verbs, the procedures, and the nouns, the data and materials, all have a unique identifier. The relationships between verbs and nouns is provided by simple links. Thus the structured vocabulary of the lab notebook is [Material] was input to [Process] which generated [Data] (where Material and Data can be interchanged depending on the process). This is not so much 80/20 as 30/70 but even in this very basic form in can be quite useful. Along with records of who did something and when, and some basic tagging this actually makes a quite an effective lab notebook system.

"The question is, how can we move beyond this to create a record which is richer enough to provide a real step up, but doesn’t bother the user any more than is necessary and justified by the extra functionality that they’re getting. In fact, ideally we’d capture a richer and more useful record while bothering the user less. A part of the solution lies in the work that Jeremy Frey’s group have done with blogging instruments. ((("Blogjects."))) By having an instrument create a record of its state, inputs and outputs, the user is freed to focus on what their doing, and only needs to link into that record when they start to do their analysis.

"Another route is the approach that Peter Murray-Rust’s group are exploring with interactive lab equipment, particularly a fume cupboard that can record spoken instructions (((!))) and comments and track where objects are, (((