The BioAssay Express project is about describing bioassay protocols using machine readable annotations (which are URIs that have been appropriated from semantic web dictionaries). Because almost all currently existing bioassay protocols are represented as text, much of the focus has been on finding ways to streamline the annotation process. Thinking forward to the future, however, we anticipate that once this technology is widely deployed, scientists will find it easier to annotate new protocols using our templates and web-based interface than to write up many pages of prose using a wordprocessor.

For this reason, we are experimenting with running the process in reverse: converting the nicely structured semantic web annotations to scientific English, so that the biologist doesn’t have to do. Continue reading →