The Semantic Capabilities of ELNs - Tips on Integration

May 25, 2011 - PRLog -- J Trigg: Just to start, I’d like you to briefly introduce yourself and maybe explain your interests in ELNs.

J Frey: Yes, my background is a physical chemist. My research involves the use of lasers to investigate a wide variety of chemical problems, and as such I work with many of my chemistry colleagues from other parts of the discipline, and physicists, and increasingly with computer scientists. My interest in the whole problem of ELN came up from our desire to be able to reproduce our research without having to redo it, and realising that in many cases the records that we were keeping of our research were not as complete as we would like, and certainly not as accessible or shareable as we would want. I joined in with the UK e-Science Research team that started about ten years ago where the whole desire was to use modern technology, the web, semantics and many other aspects of digital technology to improve the reliability and the reusability of research and research data. And for chemists, the starting point of this is often the laboratory. No books, so this becomes an electronic laboratory notebook and I’ve been interested to see just what we could do with that and what the future will bring and what advantages it will bring.

J Trigg: The first question really touches on the word, semantics, which you used in your introduction there. I guess the term has crept into our vocabulary over the past few years but I’m particularly interested to know how you see the role of semantics in the context of electronic laboratory notebooks and laboratory information management.

To access the interview transcript and mp3 in full please click here: www.elnforum.com/news




Both Jeremy Frey and John Trigg will be speaking at the forthcoming ELNS & Advanced Laboratory Solutions Conference, which is due to take place between 26th and 28th September 2011 at the Hilton, Barcelona, Spain. For further information please visit www.elnforum.com, email enquire@iqpc.co.uk or call + (0)207 368 9300.