Semantic Description and Tracking of Analysis of Chemical Data

We investigate the use of semantic technologies to describe chemical data in a manner that facilitates the subsequent reuse of both the data and the analysis procedure used to produce the data. We first propose an approach to describe and record the analysis process for a physical chemistry laser spectroscopic experiment that serves as an e-logbook for people and provides a sufficiently rich semantic description suitable for programmatic processing of the entries. We then developed a semantic-aware enactment system to perform the analysis using the information in the RDF description of the analysis process. A generic RDF browser was developed to browse and reuse the analysis process. The raw and analyzed data is displayed graphically in web browser using interactive SVG tools. This approach demonstrates that semantic technology is an appropriate technology to record and manage the complicated, flexible analysis procedures used to interpret physical chemistry experimental data.