The EXACT description of biomedical protocols.
BACKGROUND
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.


BACKGROUND
The ontology, examples and code can be downloaded from http://www.aber.ac.uk/compsci/Research/bio/dss/EXACT/.
Soldatova
Larisa N
LN
Department of Computer Science, Aberystwyth University, Penglais, Aberystwyth, SY23 3DB, Wales, UK. lss@aber.ac.uk
Aubrey
Wayne
W
King
Ross D
RD
Clare
Amanda
A
D003628:Database Management Systems; D016208:Databases, Factual; D004282:Documentation / Q000379:methods*; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D020407:Internet; D012106:Research / Q000145:classification* / Q000592:standards*