A semantic lab notebook - Report on a use case modelling an experiment of a microwave-based quarantine method

Abstract

A recent trend in a number of academic disciplines is the publication of results of experiments together with the scientific article for a better reproducibility of the published experiments and algorithms. Semantic Web technologies have the potential to aid scientists in the publishing, sharing and interlinking of this data and also in helping other scientists in the understanding of the data and the interpretation of the results of an experiment. In this paper we report on a use case on how to publish the data captured in a scientific experiment that has been conducted in the CSIRO Animal, Food and Health Sciences division as a set of ontologies and how to access this data through a set of RESTful semantic Web services. These services showcase how computational tasks that cannot be represented in the ontology can be implemented as lightweight semantic Web services to document and verify the results of an experiment. Together, the ontologies, the experimental data and the computational services constitute the elements needed for a semantically enabled lab notebook, facilitating research studies over multiple experiments, while reducing complexity and error rates.