A collaborative approach to the reuse of scientific experiments in the Bill of Experiments tool

This article presents the Bill of Experiments tool (BOE), a collaborative environment for the reuse of scientific experiments. The tool is a Web-based system aimed at scientists and suppliers of scientific artifacts. It is capable of pointing out the best alternatives for the accomplishment of scientific experiments based on cost criteria, deadline attainment and quality, in an analogy with the bill of materials process. With the aid of a scientific database on experiments we can describe a collaborative environment for the explicit description, combination, generation (design) and reuse of scientific knowledge. For this work we used concepts from various research areas, like knowledge management, databases, artificial intelligence workflow and CSCW. We present a study case applied to the biological area. We obtained the best alternatives for the experiment's detailed accomplishment and an explanation of why the inference module was chosen, and the advantage of using CLP techniques over conventional optimization techniques. BOE acts as an Internet portal that unites researchers, institutions and companies in a paradigm similar to B2B.