Making Science Machine Readable 135
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."
Re:the edge is always fuzzy (Score:2, Interesting)
hard-edged classes, at least not often.
Some good classes like "protons" and
"neutron stars" exist, of course, but
concepts like "words" and "species" are
intrinsically fuzzy if you think about them
long enough.
Same with experiments. Let's take a Linguistic
example: deciding whether or not a sentence is
gramatically correct. You can do this experiment
in several ways:
1) Give the person a sentence, a library, and
some paper. Let them take as long as they want.
2) Or, we can make it more like a conversation:
read them the sentence, and put a time limit on
it. In real speech, you have about a second
to understand a sentence, so we only accept
a "yes" or "no" if it happens within a second.
3) Make it into a reaction-time experiment.
Get them to hit a yes button or a no button
and measure how long it takes.
The point is, you can do dozens of variants of any
experiment, and any ontology will lump together
some things that are different in some important
way, or (alternatively) will split apart some
experiments that have critical similarities.
Likewise for data analysis.
Personally, I feel that Linguistics has been held
back for about two decades by linguist's expectation
that everything falls into nice categories.
I'd hate for the same thing to happen to other fields.
Just think of the Dewey Decimal system: that's an
ontology, and like all ontologies, it puts the
dividing lines in the wrong place.