As I mentioned a couple of weeks or so ago I’ve been playing around with Friendfeed. This is a ‘lifestreaming’ web service which allows you to aggregate ‘all’ of the content you are generating on the web into one place (see here for mine). This is interesting from my perspective because it maps well onto our ideas about generating multiple data streams from a research lab. This raw data then needs to be pulled together and turned into some sort of narrative description of what happened.

More on the discussion of structured vs unstructured experiment descriptions. Frank has put up a description of the Minimal Information about a Neuroscience Investigation standard at Nature Precedings which comes out of the CARMEN project. Neil Saunder’s has also made some comments on the resistance amongst the lab monkeys to think about structure. Lots of good points here. I wanted to pick out a couple in particular;
From Neil;
My take on the problem is that biologists spend a lot of time generating, analysing and presenting data, but they don’t spend much …

During the workshop in late February we had discussions about possible implementations of Taverna work flows to automate specific processes to make our life easier. One specific example we discussed was the reduction and initial analysis of Small Angle Neutrons Scattering data. Here I want to describe a bit of the background to what this is and what we might do to kick of the discussion.

‘No data model survives contact with reality’ – Me, Cosener’s House Workshop 29 February 2008
This flippant comment was in response to (I think) Paolo Missier asking me ‘what the data model is’ for our experiments. We were talking about how we might automate various parts of the blog system but the point I was making was that we can’t have a data model with any degree of specificity because we very quickly find the situation where they don’t fit. However, having spent some time thinking about machine readability and the …

Following on from (but unrelated to) my post last week about feed tools we have two posts, one from Deepak Singh, and one from Neil Saunders, both talking about ‘friend feeds’ or ‘lifestreams’. The idea here is of aggregating all the content you are generating (or is being generated about you?) into one place. There are a couple of these about but the main ones seem to be Friendfeed and Profiliac. See Deepaks’s post (or indeed his Friendfeed) for details of the conversations that can come out of these type …

Lots of helpful comments from people on my question about what to use as a good identifier of chemicals? I thought it might be useful to re-phrase what it was that I wanted because I think some of the comments, while important discussion points don’t really impinge directly on my current issue.
I have in mind a special type of page on our LaBLog system that will easily allow the generation of a post that describes a new bottle of material that comes into the lab. From a user perspective you …

Two things last week gave me more cause to think a bit harder about the RSS feeds from our LaBLog and how we can use them. First, when I gave my talk at UKOLN I made a throwaway comment about search and aggregation. I was arguing that the real benefits of open practice would come when we can use other people’s filters and aggregation tools to easily access the science that we ought to be seeing. Google searching for a specific thing isn’t enough. We need to have an aggregated …

DUE TO SEVERE COMMENT SPAM ON THIS POST I HAVE CLOSED IT TO COMMENTS
On February 28/29 we held a workshop on our Blog Based notebook system at the Cosener’s House in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. This was a small workshop with 13 people including biochemists (from Southampton, Cardiff, and RAL), social scientists (from Oxford Internet Institute and Computing Laboratory), developers from the MyGrid and MyExperiment family and members of the the Blog development team. The purpose of the workshop was to try and identify both the key problems that need to be …