From actions to suggestions: supporting the work of biologists through laboratory notebooks

The paper presents an approach and a technology to support the work of biologists in their laboratories. By means of analysis of related literature, informal discussions with people working in laboratory, and experience of one the authors with laboratory work in genomic research, we identified different biologists’ information needs and different strategies in order to satisfy them. A relevant part of biologists’ work practice is about the continuous annotation of their work in their personal notebooks. We claim that observing notebooks can boost a technology which is a generalization of recommendation systems and provides biologists with suggestions concerning their work. These suggestions are generated by combining the observation of biologists performed actions in the past with actions patterns incorporating biologists’ work practices that are discovered by the system out of the transcriptions of biologists’notebooks.