Experimental Protocols

Experimental Protocols are central for reproducibility purposes; researchers keep detailed descriptions of their experiments in these documents. Lists of reagents, equipments, instructions, recipes, etc are often part of the content of experimental protocols. Although experimental protocols are key, they remain highly idiosyncratic. The content varies, the granularity of the descriptions depends on what the researcher considers important, recipes are not always listed, the steps are very often insufficiently described. Moreover, the interconnectivity and interoperability intrinsic to this kind of documents is inexistent for machines to process -and by doing so make research simpler in tasks such as retrieving similar or reusable protocols. Also, the workflow nature of protocols is hidden in a complicated narrative that is not easy for robots, or machines in general, to “understand”.

This WG aims to address these issues.