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

Re:EXPO has a serious naming problem

[FudRucker]

i noticed that too, hopefully this story will be duped when Expo gets a detailed home page. so far the home page shows up as empty...

Re:XML?

[Marc2k]

Exactly [sort of]. All the while I was reading this article, I couldn't shake the feeling of: this faces some of the exact same [hard] problems faced by the Semantic Web. This is a great way to get computers to understand the semantics of scientific experiments...when everyone's using the format, which probably isn't as expressive as is necessary in all cases, and invariably isn't bulletproof yet. It's that same chicken-and-egg problem, where the only benefits to using this system are seen when a large number of people use the system, which many people won't simply because there are no software tools available yet (or probably for a long while), and it's a time-intensive process.