Head in the clouds: Re-imagining the experimental laboratory record for the web-based networked world

Abstract

The means we use to record the process of carrying out research remains tied to the concept of a paginated paper notebook despite the advances over the past decade in web based communication and publication tools. The development of these tools offers an opportunity to re-imagine what the laboratory record would look like if it were re-built in a web-native form. In this paper I describe a distributed approach to the laboratory record based which uses the most appropriate tool available to house and publish each specific object created during the research process, whether they be a physical sample, a digital data object, or the record of how one was created from another. I propose that the web-native laboratory record would act as a feed of relationships between these items. This approach can be seen as complementary to, rather than competitive with, integrative approaches that aim to aggregate relevant objects together to describe knowledge. The potential for the recent announcement of the Google Wave protocol to have a significant impact on realizing this vision is discussed along with the issues of security and provenance that are raised by such an approach.

LabTrove: A Lightweight, Web Based, Laboratory “Blog” as a Route towards a Marked Up Record of Work in a Bioscience Research Laboratory

“…Neylon has discussed what a ‘web-native’ laboratory record would look like, emphasising the potential of unique identifiers i.e. Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) for research elements, notification mechanisms that provide annotated lists of recently created objects, and tools that facilitate the creation of links between those objects [24].…”

An informatics project and online “Knowledge Centre” supporting modern genotype-to-phenotype research

“…There is also a need for more effective representation of scientific knowledge distilled from research data, and for linking data and other research objects into future modalities for semantic publishing [Bourne, 2005[Bourne, , 2010Neylon, 2009;Shotton et al, 2009]. Furthermore, as the real and virtual worlds of science increasingly merge so that research is ''done'' not just ''reported'' online, there is a need to come up with completely new paradigms for socioscientific interaction in the digital age [Stafford, 2010], to promote highly collaborative and interactive modes of Internetbased scholarly debate and communication.…”

Google Wave: Have CTSI-Minded Institutions Caught It?

“…There have been a few recently published articles that discuss the potential of Google Wave as a Web-based laboratory record (Neylon, 2009) and as a tool to help pediatricians (Sethi, 2010), but neither of these provided actual evidence on the use of Wave. Another article discussed the concrete development of a Google Wave “SynBioWave” for synthetic biologists, but offered no evaluation of its adoption (Staab, Walossek, Nellessen, Grünberg, Arndt, & Müller, 2010).…”