ONS Solubility Web Query

Rajarshi Guha created a web interface for the solubility data that we've been collecting in a GoogleDoc spreadsheet as part of the Open Notebook Science Challenge. There are convenient drop-down menus for solvents, solutes and you can even put in a range of solubilities. Duplicate runs should show up nicely for comparison. The solute molecules are also rendered as images.

In this example, Rajarshi is using an SQL database but it would be convenient to query the RDF data directly using similar types of interfaces.

And no matter how many ways we shuffle or reformat data there will always be a link to the original lab notebook page that generated each measurement. There isn't any reason to break the chain of provenance all the way to the peer-reviewed article when it is time.

RDF triples for Open Notebook Science solubility data

Following up on a recent FriendFeed conversation about a blog post on the Triumvirate of Scientific Data prompted Pierre Lindenbaum to create an RDF representation of our solubility data that validates into triples.

I'll admit that I don't have much experience with RDF but I can see how the triples are connected and it is clear that this is a format very suitable for machine readability. It is nice that the provenance of the data is clearly indicated by links to the original lab notebook pages (for example EXP207) with all the details about how the solubility measurements were carried out.

In terms of information flow we go from a lab notebook wiki to a GoogleDoc spreadsheet to RDF. The GoogleDoc should only contain data has passed my inspection so treating these properties as "facts" in the RDF document is not unreasonable.

It will be interesting to see what can be done with this.

As Pierre mentions in the FF conversation, in order to view the triples as shown below, copy the RDF document as text and paste in this RDF validation service.