EXPO

Ontology of scientific experiments.

EXPO defines over 200 concepts for creating semantic markup about scientific experiments, using the Web Ontology Language OWL.

We propose the ontology EXPO to formalise generic knowledge about scientific experimental design, methodology, and results representation. Such a common ontology is both feasible and desirable because all the sciences follow the same experimental principles. The formal description of experiments for efficient analysis, annotation, and sharing of results is a fundamental objective of science.

The utilisation of a common ontology for the annotation of scientific experiments would:

• Make scientific knowledge more explicit.
• Help detect errors.
• Enable the sharing and reuse of common knowledge.
• Remove redundancies in domain-specific ontologies.
• Promote the interchange and reliability of experimental methods and conclusions.

EXPO was built in the Hozo Ontology Editor.
EXPO is used in The Robot Scientist

Members of the Working Group

Dr. Larisa N. Soldatova

Prof. Ross D. King

Dr. Amanda Clare

References

• EXPO on SourceForge
• Soldatova L.N., Clare A., Sparkes A. and King, R.D. (2006) An ontology for a Robot Scientist. Bioinformatics (Special issue ISMB) (in press).
• Soldatova, LN & King, RD. (2006) An Ontology of Scientific Experiments. Journal of the Royal Society Interface (in press).
• EXPO: An Ontology of Scientific Research by Ross D. King & Larisa N. Soldatova, Department of Computer Science, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.