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Comment by ur-whale | Hacker News Reader

This kind of endeavor should be a common theme to all science, not just chemistry.

It's certainly a goal to work towards. However, it's pretty difficult to build One ELN to Rule Them All given how flexible many kinds of biological experimental designs are - especially when you're working on the bleeding edge.

A good first step is to require supplemental materials are published in a machine readable format (e.g. not manually thrown together Excel files that lack any kind of normalization or rational schema)

But then there are things like GPT-3 , which means stashing everything in a rigid schema isn't as hard-core of a requirement as it used to be.

OTOH, facilitating:

    1. access to the raw data
    2. access to the metadata
    3. access to the source code of whatever software was used / created to run the experiment
    4. making sure everything is computer readable (i.e. not a 256x128 graph as a PNG embedded in a bloody PDF)

should be a requirement for any scientific publication worth its salt.

> it's pretty difficult to build One ELN to Rule Them All given how flexible many kinds of biological experimental designs are - especially when you're working on the bleeding edge.

RDF is quite flexible and using a combination of domain specific ontologies like cheminf[1] and other top level ontologies like BFO[2] should allow you to capture most of the semantics.

[1]: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ols/ontologies/cheminf [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Formal_Ontology?wprov=sf...

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