Pedro suggested in Nature Networks What’s Next\nforum that Nature should add a new service for scientists: hosting electronic lab notebooks. And I think this will be a killer application.\nI am rather excited about the idea, and feel ashamed not putting one-and-one together myself. We have our\nchemoinformatics tools and RDF\nis just around the corner, that combined with semantic wikis, and we have science of the 21st century.\nThis is my reply posted on Nature Network:
\n\n\n", "summary": "Pedro suggested in Nature Networks What’s Next forum that Nature should add a new service for scientists: hosting electronic lab notebooks. And I think this will be a killer application. I am rather excited about the idea, and feel ashamed not putting one-and-one together myself. We have our chemoinformatics tools and RDF is just around the corner, that combined with semantic wikis, and we have science of the 21st century. This is my reply posted on Nature Network:", "date_published": "2007-06-25T00:00:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2025-02-22T00:00:00+00:00", "tags": ["nature","eln","openscience"], "authors": [ { "name": "Egon Willighagen", "url": "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7542-0286" } ] } ] }Pedro, that might be an interesting idea: Nature hosting ELN. with much content, I have been maintaining a wiki in my previous postdoc,\nas replacement for the old paper notebook. Allows me to make links etc. I plan to do this in my new postdoc too, maybe even with a\nRDF-enabled wiki, to have agents automatically verify what I enter for inconsistencies. These things are already possible; just a\nmatter of doing it.
\n\nIf Nature would host such a service (RDF-enabled, and integrated with their other pages), they have a true killer for me: I write\nmy ELN items, and for each page I decide if I want to make it public; since it is a wiki, I can keep it private until happy about\nthe results, or, simply, until the experiment has finished. Then, by clicking a button it would become CC+attribution and\nautomatically end up in Nature Preceedings. The full integration of Scintilla/Postgenomic/Connotea comes in when making links to\nbackground material.
\n\nThe RDF is important for validating what I write, and I can imagine that Nature has an extensive set of default agents (of course,\nin addition to spell checking etc :). These agents check if the chemical reaction equations makes sense (conservation of mass,\natom count, etc), that NMR/MS spectra and other experimental properties are consistent with that equation, and whatever else\nwe can come up with. The tools for this validation are available, and basically only the glue is missing.
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