Hi Frank, I don't think we fundamentally disagree. I think controlled vocabs are great where they can be applied but in my experience you either end up in a situation where your vocab no longer fits (should I use FUGE or CML?) or worse, where your vocab actually constrains your experiment.

Where they can be used, and where things can be agreed, then tools should be written to help people use them. But at the moment I don't think those tools exist for the humble experimenter such as myself.

To give an example. Your gelML documentation runs to N pages. From my perspective I would just say 'I ran a gel', see e.g. http://chemtools.chem.soton.ac.uk/projects/blog/blogs.php/bit_id/2733
Now what would be brilliant would be if our system could automatically say, 'well this is a gel, therefore I should try and expose the description in gelML with all the info that I have availablee'. But then someone has to implement that for gels, for columns, for NMR, for neutron scattering data, ...

My arguement is that we need to be able to use all of these vocabs, or none, to describe experiments to a practical level of detail. My proposal isn't to 'use a wiki', in fact we use a blog. Most other people who are really using these systems in anger in a wetlab are using wikis because they prefer the functionality available. We need to have an extremely general framework that we can then slot all of these different systems into.