BioCoder #9

Chapter 3. Crowdsourcing a Language for the Lab

Marcus Carr and Timothy Gardner

Neither human nor machine communication can happen without language standards. Advancing science and technology demands standards for communication, but also adaptability to enable innovation. ResourceMiner is an open source project attempting to provide both.

 

From Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press to the Internet of today, technology has enabled faster communication, and faster communication has accelerated technology development. Today, we can zip photos from a mountaintop in Switzerland back home to San Francisco with hardly a thought, but that wasn’t so trivial just a decade ago. It’s not just selfies that are being sent; it’s also product designs, manufacturing instructions, and research plans—all of it enabled by invisible technical standards (e.g., TCP/IP) and language standards (e.g., English) that allow machines and people to communicate.

But in the laboratory sciences (life, chemical, material, and other disciplines), communication remains inhibited by practices more akin to the oral traditions of a blacksmith shop than the modern Internet. In a typical academic lab, the reference description of an experiment is the long-form narrative in the “Materials and Methods” section of a paper or a book. Similarly, industry researchers depend on basic text documents in the form of standard operating procedures. In both cases, essential details of the materials and protocol for an experiment ...