is about improving the information environment for chemists doing chemistry - within and beyond the lab.

Smart Tea is about supporting chemists in the preparation, execution, analysis and dissemination of their experimental work.

Background

When chemists run experiments, they create a great deal of information: they describe hypotheses; they delineate methods for testing those hypotheses; they reference others' efforts in similar experiments; they record exact amounts of chemicals used, and the methods for combining them; they analyse the success or failure of these results.

For all its technical sophistication, the modern lab experiment is still recorded using the same tools as scientists have been using over the past 200 years: a bound paper lab book.

While the flexibility of the lab book makes it great for chemists while carrying out an experiment - they can move it easily from their desk to the lab bench to a shelf - the book itself is a poor mechanism for making the information stored in that book available to other scientists within the lab, or for that matter, to the same scientist after the experiment has been completed: if the scientist does not have the lab book to hand, the information is unavailable.

Motivation

Part of the world wide eScience Semantic Grid effort is to get the data crafted by individual scientists out of the lab and onto the Grid, where it can be accessed, compared and processed within the global science community.

To that end, the Smart Tea Project is focussing on the experimental process itself in order to understand how the (usually hand written) information generated in the lab can be transformed into information accessible beyond the confines of a single experimental entry in a single paper-based lab book.

The Lab Aether

With the evolution of the Semantic Grid and Pervasive Computing (information and computers everywhere), it is possible to change our thinking about information away from the lab book to the lab aether .

The ancient concept of aether was of an invisible medium, all around us. In our concept of a lab aether, the aether is the invisible medium holding information being generated within the lab. As chemists build up an experiment, they release the data to the lab aether where it can be captured, reused and displayed in multiple contexts, from plan to publication.

We can think in terms of such an aether now because of research developments like web services, intelligent agents and the semantic grid. We use effective information interaction design to support scientists both populate data into the aether and grab it back as needed.

Making Tea

The Smart Tea project involves researchers from various fields within Chemistry and Computer Science. On the computer science team alone, we have researchers in semantic web information systems, grid computing, intelligent agents, web services, and human computer interaction.

In order for all of us to gain a better understanding of the chemists' lab experiences, and of the experimental design and execution process in particular, we made tea as a chemistry experiment. The experiment was lead by team member Graham Smith, a chemist and computer scientist.

Above, two versions of Making Tea: one, using household objects (images 1-3, 7); one using the appropriate chemical experimental apparatus (images 3-6, 8). We were most interested in what was recorded by the chemist during the experiments (image 9, pages from each experiement; click to enlarge view).

The Smart Tea Team

Gareth Hughes, Hugo Mills, Terry Payne, m.c. schraefel and Graham Smith.

The Smart Tea Project is part of the larger CombeChem eScience project. Project director is Jeremy Frey; Dave De Roure is the PI for the Computer Science team.