The EXACT description of biomedical protocols

Larisa Nikolaevna Soldatova*, Wayne Aubrey, Ross Donald King, Amanda Janet Clare

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

36 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Motivation: Many published manuscripts contain experiment protocols which are poorly described or deficient in information. This means that the published results are very hard or impossible to repeat. This problem is being made worse by the increasing complexity of high-throughput/automated methods. There is therefore a growing need to represent experiment protocols in an efficient and unambiguous way.

Results: We have developed the Experiment ACTions (EXACT) ontology as the basis of a method of representing biological laboratory protocols. We provide example protocols that have been formalized using EXACT, and demonstrate the advantages and opportunities created by using this formalization. We argue that the use of EXACT will result in the publication of protocols with increased clarity and usefulness to the scientific community.

Availability: The ontology, examples and code can be downloaded from http://www.aber.ac.uk/compsci/Research/bio/dss/EXACT/
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)i295-i303
Number of pages9
JournalBioinformatics
Volume24
Issue number13
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 01 Jul 2008

Keywords

  • Database Management Systems
  • Databases, Factual
  • Documentation/methods
  • Information Storage and Retrieval/methods
  • Internet
  • Research/classification

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