Adapting the electronic laboratory notebook for the semantic era

The open source electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) is a collaborative, distributed, Web-based notebook system, designed to provide researchers with a means to record and share their primary research notes and data. As with most electronic notebook (EN) systems, the ELN was originally designed as a closed system with its own data repository and implicit semantics. The scientific annotation middleware (SAM) project, a Department of Energy (DOE)-funded effort at Pacific Northwest and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, envisions a new model in which ENs are simply one application contributing to a much richer and semantically explicit record. Such a record would include, for example, data provenance, descriptive metadata, and annotations from a wide range of applications, problem solving environments, and agents. This paper reports the adaptation of the ELN client to use SAM and the development of an initial set of SAM-based notebook services and semantic model, and then discusses the advantages of such an architecture in creating federated, human- and machine-interpretable, electronic research records