I’ve been interested for some time in capturing information and the context in which that information is created in the lab. The question of how to build an efficient and useable laboratory recording system is fundamentally one of how much information is necessary to record and how much of that can be recorded while bothering the researcher themselves as little as possible. The problem with sophisticated systems that can catch everything is that they break. The problem with simple systems is that they don’t provide enough structure to be useful. But a little structure with a simple framework, like twitter, might provide a route to getting a lot of useful information easy recorded for a lab record.

This is the second of two posts discussing the talk I gave at the Science 2.0 Symposium organized by Greg Wilson in Toronto in July. As I described in the last post Jon Udell pulled out the two key points from my talk and tweeted them. The first suggested some ideas about what the limiting unit of science, or rather science communication, might be. The second takes me in to rather more controversial areas:
@cameronneylon uses tags to classify records in a bio lab wiki. When emergent ontology doesn’t match the …

Some months ago now I gave a talk at very exciting symposium organized by Greg Wilson as a closer for the Software Carpentry course he was running at Toronto University. It was exciting because of the lineup but also because it represented a real coming together of views on how developments in computer science and infrastructure as well as new social capabilities brought about by computer networks are changing scientific research.I talked, as I have several times recently, about the idea of a web-native laboratory record, thinking about what the paper notebook would look like if …

Google Wave has got an awful lot of people quite excited. And others are more sceptical. A lot of SciFoo attendees were therefore very excited to be able to get an account on the developer sandbox as part of the weekend. At the opening plenary Stephanie Hannon gave a demo of Wave and, although there were numerous things that didn’t work live, that was enough to get more people interested. On the Saturday morning I organized a session to discuss what we might do and also to provide an opportunity …

In the previous post  I discussed a workflow using Wave to author and publish a paper. In this post I want to look at the possibility of using it as a laboratory record, or more specifically as a human interface to the laboratory record. There has been much work in recent years on research portals and Virtual Research Environments. While this work will remain useful in defining use patterns and interface design my feeling is that Wave will become the environment of choice, a framework for a virtual research environment …

Yes, I’m afraid it’s yet another over the top response to yesterday’s big announcement of Google Wave, the latest paradigm shifting gob-smackingly brilliant piece of technology (or PR depending on your viewpoint) out of Google. My interest, however is pretty specific, how can we leverage it to help us capture, communicate, and publish research? And my opinion is that this is absolutely game changing – it makes a whole series of problems simply go away, and potentially provides a route to solving many of the problems that I was struggling …

There is an interesting meta-discussion going on in a variety of places at the moment which touch very strongly on my post and talk (slides, screencast) from last week about “web native” lab notebooks. Over at Depth First, Rich Apodaca has a post with the following little gem of a soundbite:
Could it be that both Open Access and Electronic Laboratory Notebooks are examples of telephone-like capabilities being used to make a better telegraph?
Web-Centric Science offers a set of features orthoginal to those of paper-centric science. Creating the new system in …

This is a case of a comment that got so long (and so late) that it probably merited it’s own post. David Crotty and Paul (Ling-Fung Tang) note some important caveats in comments on my last post about the idea of the “web native” lab notebook. I probably went a bit strong in that post with the idea of pushing content onto outside specialist services in my effort to try to explain the logic of the lab notebook as a feed. David notes an important point about any third part …

At Science Online 09 and at the Smi Electronic Laboratory Notebook meeting in London later in January I talked about how laboratory notebooks might evolve. At Science Online 09 the session was about Open Notebook Science and here I wanted to take the idea of what a “web native” lab record could look like and show that if you go down this road you will get the most out if you are open. At the ELN meeting which was aimed mainly at traditional database backed ELN systems for industry I wanted to show the potential of …

Two rather exciting things are happening at the moment. Firstly we have finally got the LaBLog system up and running at RAL (http://biolab.isis.rl.ac.uk). Not a lot is happening there yet but we are gradually working up to a full Open Notebook status, starting by introducing people to the system bit by bit. My first experiment went up there late last week, it isn’t finished yet but I better get some of the data analysis done as rpg, if no-one else, is interested in the results.
The other area of development is …