A number of things have prompted me to be thinking about what makes a piece of writing “original” in a web based world where we might draft things in the open, get informal public peer review, where un-refereed conference posters can be published online, and pre-print servers of submitted versions of papers are increasingly widely used.

And other big words I learnt from mathematicians… The observant amongst you will have realised that the title of my previous post pushing a boat out into the area of semantics and RDF implied there was more to come. Those of you who followed the reaction [comments in original post, 1, 2, 3] will also be aware that there are much smarter and more knowledgeable people out there thinking about these problems.

Lots of helpful comments from people on my question about what to use as a good identifier of chemicals? I thought it might be useful to re-phrase what it was that I wanted because I think some of the comments, while important discussion points don’t really impinge directly on my current issue.

We are in the process of rolling out the LaBLog system to the new bioscience laboratory within ISIS at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Because this is a new lab we have a real opportunity to embed the system in the way we run the laboratory and the way we practise our science. One of the things we definitely want to do is to use it to maintain a catalogue of all our stocks of chemicals.