Making Science Machine Readable

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist is reporting on a new open source tool for writing up scientific experiments for computers, not humans. Called EXPO, it avoids the many problems computers have with natural language, and can be applied to any experiment, from physics to biology. It could at last let computers do real science - looking at published results and theories for new links and directions."

Comments

EXPO has a serious naming problem

[plover]

It's virtually hopeless to try to find information about EXPO on Google. You've got the Home Depot Expo site, you've got E3, Macworld Expo, Linuxworld Expo, Book Expo; expositions seem to be coming out of your ears, and if you try to qualify it with helpful keywords such as science and/or language, it seems that every elementary school is hawking their science expos, in addition to documents from historical expos going back to the 1970s and possibly even earlier!

And forgive me for thinking the university would be more helpful, but no, there's been a series of expos at the University of Aberystwyth, from art through VoIP.

I'd love to have found more info on the language, but my casual browsing got stopped right there.

If they'd named it something like EXPI or EXPLO at least it'd be uniquely locatable. Google might whine about the potential misspelling of Expo, but it would dutifully locate the search term as requested.

Wait, what does it do?

[Jonboy X]

The article is kind of unclear. What exactly does EXPO do? At first it seemed to me that the system helped translate the more-or-less natural language format of your average scientific experiment writeup into some other more machine-parsable format, but then I saw this at the bottom of the article:

King admits that for the moment using EXPO is time-consuming because experimental write-ups must be translated by hand.

WTF? If you have to manually pre-parse every article that enters the system, it severely limits the rate you can enter information into the database, no?