Yesterday afternoon the Open Notebook Science case studies session was held as part of the Scifoo lives on sessions at Nature Island, Second Life. Jean-Claude Bradley organised, moderated and spoke first followed by me and Jeremiah Faith. We all spoke about experiences and implementation of different approaches to open notebook science. Jean-Claude has put the transcript up here.

Research in most places today is done under more or less rigorous safety regimes. A general approach which I believe is fairly universal is that any action should in principle be ‘Risk Assessed’. For many everyday procedures such an assessment may not need to be written down but it is general practise in the UK that there needs to be a paper trail that demonstrates that such risk assessments are carried out.

In previous posts I have discussed the setup and rationale for how we are organising our blog-based electronic laboratory notebook. This has covered how the blog is actually organised. In this post I will look at the issue of how we actually view the blog and extract information. The organisation of the blog with a ‘one item one post’ approach creates a problem. There are a large number of posts to describe even a relatively simple process.

I am continuing this in a new post rather than keeping mucking with the old one. Currently I am working on reproducing the description of Exp098 from Jean-Claude Bradley’s UsefulChem Wiki within our blog based notebook to identify differences in practise.

In a previous post I said I would try to replicate an experiment from the UsefulChem open Wiki notebook within our blog system to see how it might look. This post is to record what I am doing as I do it. Thus this is the lab book I am using to record the process and decisions I have taken in using a lab book.

I went along to a session on enabling uptake, which has evolved out of groups based in education and training. This mainly involved people focussed on education and training and support people. It was mainly focussed on Grid based systems. Two interesting things came out of this I thought.

Having just posted that there didn’t seem to be too much of this we have a talk in the Social Sciences parallel session that covers exactly this.Pete Edwards talked (amongst other things) about ourSpaces, a tool providing a resource for sharing resources that can be tagged in all the expected Facebook style ways. He then went on to talk about how you record both data and how it is recorded i.e. methodology.

Some responses to John Wood’s talk on e-science infrastructure at AHM2007. The talk focussed on large scale infrastructure and the need for co-ordination. There are serious political and logistical problems for making proper coordination happen. A couple of interesting comments came out; Need for the involvement of historians and sociologists to follow what is happening.

Some themes seem to emerge to me from the talks I have been to. One is that the many people are talking about the need to expand the reach of e-science tools out to the ‘general scientific community’.  As I noted in other posts part of this is a problem with language.

Brief notes on this parallel session from E-science all hands meeting on Tuesday morning. First talk in this session discussed the CARMEN project which aims to provide repositories and tools for neuroscience electrophyisology data. There was a short discussion on the challenges of persuading scientists to put the data in. The speaker’s (Paul Watson) view was that this would probably need to be driven by funders and journals.

Following on from the post yesterday I actually went along to the workshop with the title I didn’t understand. There was much I didn’t understand and a lot of technical terminology that went straight over my head. Terminology is an issue here, particularly where there is a desire to bring in new people.