Semantic Support for Recording Laboratory Experimental Metadata: A Study in Food Chemistry

摘要

A fundamental principle of scientific enquiry is to create proper documentation of data and methods during experimental research. Providing the context of observations is essential for the understanding their meaning and for the reproduction of the experiment. Proper annotation also increases the likelihood of data being found and reused by the same or other researchers. Good scientific practice in the laboratory requires that lab reports describe the sequence of experimental activities executed in the lab. Moreover, method descriptions should include detailed information on the materials and equipment, analytical methods, parameter settings, lab conditions, failures and other details that facilitate reproduction of an experiment This calls for adding descriptions (metadata) to research data and methods. Most researchers consider the task of describing experimental details to be essential, but at the seen as time consuming and distracting from the 'real research'. As a consequence, the documentation is often suboptimal.