OpenWetWare:Feature list/Lab notebook/2007 Oct Brainstorming/Barry: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 07:54, 5 October 2007

I try to record lots of information about my experiments and occasionally succeed.
Very often, my lab notebook is a place to think and to plan "on paper".
Because of the context I work in, having time stamping and a perfect record of everything I've done is not essential.
- My advisor doesn't want to see my lab notebook and I doubt anyone else will anytime soon.
I don't expect to be able to do much data-processing on-line, I expect that will have to live in client-side applications like MATLAB.

Ability to browse by project/date (through my own muddling and Austin's help I can do this already.
While browsing by project is the most important thing to me, some search would be useful.
- In particular, search for particular objects would be very useful. For example, searching for all instances of a particular BioBrick or reagent.
Automated cross-referencing. I'd like the notebook to automatically generate links for some items such as -
Dates: xx/xx/xx ->[[Lab Notebook/xx/xx/xx|xx/xx/xx]]
BioBricks: BBa_XXXXX -> [http://parts.mit.edu/BBa_XXXX BBa_XXXXX]
Strains, maybe reagents and protocols. These objects could be based on an ontology gathered from the materials/protocols pages of OWW.
Streamlining of the process of uploading and linking to gel images.
Because I use my notebook for planning, I'd like it to have some to-do list capabilities and the ability to always show me the next action for all the projects I'm working on (nod to the GTD nerds).
When I'm doing experiments, I want to return to my notebook multiple times to add short notes during the day rather than for one long session. For that reason, it's imperative that I not have to log in every time, that I be able to get at the pages I've been editing recently very easily (recent changes on the main notebook page?) and probably that I can leave pages open for editing for hours at a time (should we have autosaving?).