An ontology for a Robot Scientist.

Full Abstract

MOTIVATION:
A Robot Scientist is a physically implemented robotic system that can automatically carry out cycles of scientific experimentation. We are commissioning a new Robot Scientist designed to investigate gene function in S. cerevisiae. This Robot Scientist will be capable of initiating >1,000 experiments, and making >200,000 observations a day. Robot Scientists provide a unique test bed for the development of methodologies for the curation and annotation of scientific experiments:
because the experiments are conceived and executed automatically by computer, it is possible to completely capture and digitally curate all aspects of the scientific process. This new ability brings with it significant technical challenges. To meet these we apply an ontology driven approach to the representation of all the Robot Scientist's data and metadata.

RESULTS:
We demonstrate the utility of developing an ontology for our new Robot Scientist. This ontology is based on a general ontology of experiments. The ontology aids the curation and annotating of the experimental data and metadata, and the equipment metadata, and supports the design of database systems to hold the data and metadata.

AVAILABILITY:
EXPO in XML and OWL formats is at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/expo/. All materials about the Robot Scientist project are available at:
http://www.aber.ac.uk/compsci/Research/bio/robotsci/.

Learn Faster Today Improve your study skills

Author information

Author/s: Soldatova, Larisa N (LN); Clare, Amanda (A); Sparkes, Andrew (A); King, Ross D (RD);

Affiliation: Department of Computer Science, The University of Wales Aberystwyth, Penglais, Aberystwyth, SY23 3DB, Ceredigion, UK. lss(-atsign-)aber.ac.uk

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) (Bioinformatics), published in England. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2006-Jul; vol 22 (issue 14) : pp e464-71

Dates: Created 2006/07/28; Completed 2006/10/05; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 16873508, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

External Links for this article (including full text providers, if available):

Click Electronic Full-text Provider Links to see options for finding the electronic full text links to this article. Note there may be a subscription or fee required for access to the full text. See our FAQ for information on finding FREE full text articles.

This article may also be located in paper journal collections available in many libraries. Use the Journal and Publication Information above to find the full article.

MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Artificial Intelligence
Cell Culture Techniques - instrumentation; methods
Database Management Systems
Databases, Factual
Documentation - methods
Information Storage and Retrieval - methods
Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing
Research - instrumentation; methods
Robotics - instrumentation; methods
Saccharomyces cerevisiae - physiology
Saccharomyces cerevisiae Proteins - physiology
Science - instrumentation; methods
Vocabulary, Controlled

Associated Chemicals: Saccharomyces cerevisiae Proteins (0)

These are the highest related articles currently in the database:

Corpus annotation for mining biomedical events from literature. 6 Jan 2008
Integrating concept ontology and multitask learning to achieve more effective classifier training for multilevel image annotation. 28 Feb 2008
Real-time computerized annotation of pictures. 30 May 2008
Geometry-based image retrieval in binary image databases. 30 May 2008
Ontology Design Patterns for bio-ontologies: a case study on the Cell Cycle Ontology. 27 Apr 2008
Universal and adapted vocabularies for generic visual categorization. 29 Jun 2008
Script and language identification in noisy and degraded document images. 30 Dec 2007
High-precision high-coverage functional inference from integrated data sources. 23 Feb 2008
Towards ontology-driven navigation of the lipid bibliosphere. 30 Dec 2007
Discovering gene annotations in biomedical text databases. 4 Mar 2008

See 100+ related articles.