Gareth V. Hughes

Breaking the book: translating the chemistry lab book into a pervasive computing lab environment

The UK e-Science programme is relying on the evolution of the paper lab book into a pervasive data gathering lab system. To date take up of existing commercial or research lab book replacement systems has not been great. In this paper, we reconsider both the role of the lab book in the experimental cycle, as well as its affective and experiential properties as an artefact, in order to design an e-Science lab book that will be acceptable to the scientists who will use it. To this end we combined and extended existing design analysis models in order to assess the artefact functionally and experientially. We present the approach we developed, the prototype we designed based on our analysis, and the results of the formative study we performed of the artefact in real use. We show that our design elicitation method strongly contributed to the success of our prototypes take up.

The semantic smart laboratory: a system for supporting the chemical eScientist

One goal of eScience is to enable the end-to-end publication of experiments and results. In the Combechem project we have developed an innovative human-centred system which captures the process of a chemistry experiment from plan to execution. The system comprises an electronic lab book replacement, which has been successfully trialled in a synthetic organic chemistry laboratory, and a flexible back-end storage system. Working closely with the users, we found that a light touch and a high degree of flexibility was required in the user interface. In this paper, we concentrate on the representation and storage of human-scale experiment metadata, introducing an ontology to describe the record of an experiment, and a storage system for the data from our lab book software. Just as the interfaces need to be flexible to cope with whatever a chemist wishes to record, so the back end solutions need to be similarly flexible to store any metadata that may be created. The storage system is based on Semantic Web technologies, such as RDF, and Web Services. It gives a much higher degree of flexibility to the type of metadata it can store, compared to the use of rigid relational databases.

An Agent Based Approach to Finding Expertise

In many organisations people need to locate colleagues with knowledge and information to resolve a problem. Computer based systems that assist users with finding such expertise are increasingly important to organizations and scientific communities. In this paper we discuss the development of an agent based expertise finder (EF) suitable for use within an academic research environment. A key feature of this work is that the EF returns both recommended contacts and supporting documentation. The EF bases its results on information held within the organisation, for example publications, human resource records and not on CVs or user maintained records. The recommendations are presented to the user with due regard to the social context, and are supported by the documents used to make the recommendation. The technology used allows the development of distributed, interchangeable agents that use real time data to find expertise. It is our intention to use this approach within manufacturing and other knowledge intensive organisations.

Making tea: iterative design through analogy

The success of translating an analog or manual practice into a digital interactive system may depend on how well that translation captures not only the functional what and how aspects of the practice, but the why of the process as well. Addressing these attributes is particularly challenging when there is a gap in expertise between the design team and the domain to be modeled. In this paper, we describe Making Tea, a design method foregrounding the use of analogy to bridge the gap between design team knowledge and domain expertise. Making Tea complements more traditional user-centered design approaches such as ethnography and task analysis. In this paper, we situate our work with respect to other related design methods such as Cultural Probes and Artifact Walkthroughs. We describe the process by which we develop, validate and use analogy in order to maximize expert contact time in observation, interviews, design reviews and evaluation. We contextualize the method in a discussion of its use in a project we ran to replace a paper-based synthetic chemistry lab book with an interactive system for use in a pervasive lab environment.

Open hypermedia as a navigational interface to ontological information spaces

Ontologies provide a powerful tool for distributed agent-based information systems. However, in their raw form they can be difficult for users to interact with directly. Different query architectures use structured query languages as an interface but these still require the users to have an expert understanding of the underlying ontologies. By using an Open Hypermedia model as an interface to an ontological information space, users can interact with such a system using familiar browsing and navigation techniques, which are translated into queries over the underlying information. Coupled with dynamic document generation, this allows complicated queries to be made without the user having to interact directly with the ontologies. Our key contribution is a notion of hypermedia links between concepts and queries within an ontological information space. This approach is demonstrated with a Dynamic CV application built around the SoFAR agent framework and the Fundamental Open Hypermedia Model (FOHM). In addition to abstracting the interface, Open Hypermedia allows alternative linkbases to be used to represent different “query recipes”, providing different views and navigational experiences to the user.

Microsoft smart tags: support, ignore or condemn them?

This paper describes the latest instantiation of the open hypermedia concept of the generic link as it appears in Microsoft&153; Office products - the Smart Tag. We review the background to generic linking and the technology involved in Smart Tags and discuss the reaction to this application in the computing press. Recommendations are made on how the system design could be improved for our purposes.

Approaches to locating expertise using corporate knowledge

In many organisations people need to locate colleagues with knowledge and information to resolve a problem. Computer based systems that assist users with finding such expertise are increasingly important to industrial organisations. In this paper we discuss the development of Expertise Finders suitable for use within the engineering design environment as illustrated through the use of a scenario. A key feature of this work is that the Expertise Finder returns both recommended contacts and supporting documentation. The Expertise Finder bases its results on information held within the organisation, for example on-line publications repositories, human resource records and not on individually compiled Curriculum Vitaes or other forms of user maintained records. The recommendations are presented to the user with due regard to the social context, and are supported by the documents used to make the recommendation.