It s easy for practitioners of the engineering disciplines to work together because the formal languages they use for individual work are also sufficient for collaboration. The tools that are needed by engineers for creation and understanding of their results (editors, drawing tools, and simulators) are different than the tools that are needed for collaboration (revision control and analysis tools). but the language is the same. Our objective is to discover languages and tools for biology that scientists will find indispensable for their own work, and that directly support communication and collaboration. ? ? Labscape is a prototype tool for biologists that is based on a formal language for describing laboratory procedures. It functions as a ubiquitous laboratory assistant by always being available anywhere in the laboratory; by anticipating what will happen next: and by gathering and organizing data. Our hypothesis is that Labscape will have a profound affect on individual efficiency as well as the effectiveness of various forms of collaboration including knowledge transfer, team work, oversight, education, and automation. ? ? Our specific aim is to achieve sustainable use of Labscape by the diverse community of scientists assembled by the University of Washington's Cell Systems Initiative (UW!CSI) who are investigating the formation and function of the immunological synapse between Dendritic Cells and T Cells in the mammalian immune system. Our method is to apply User-Centered Design principles, and to assess the objective and subjective impact that such technologies have on biologists, laboratory technicians, science directors, students, and computational biologists. ? ? Focusing on procedure rather than interpretation as the basic language of exchange gives two advantages: 1) the language can be simple, with a good chance of obtaining universal agreement about basic abstractions; 2) tools based on the language can be useful for laboratory workers, so that authoring of understandable web-accessible content is a natural outcome of performing experiments. Our preliminary results have provided compelling evidence of the positive impact that formal languages can have on the practice of biology, when they are combined with appropriate tools and interfaces. These results have encouraged us to aggressively pursue practical development of our concepts for assessment in a rigorous collaborative biology environment. It is our intent for the languages and tools that we develop to be generally applicable in molecular and cell biology. The concepts and tools will be disseminated through publication and software distribution where appropriate. As progress is made, participation in standards bodies might also be warranted.
