We should realize that scale is critical in establishing a new paradigm. In order to encourage large scale participation from everyone in the scientific community, two requirements are placed on the ontology to be developed here: (1) the terms should be as general as possible so that researchers across all disciplines can use the ontology; and (2) the ontology should facilitate development of easy-to-use self-publishing tools that everyone will like to use.

Note that there are some domain-specific ontologies, such as microarray experiment ontology, already existed today. However, the scope of the current task is broader than any of these. In fact, the ontology to be developed here will not be specific to any research domain.

Use Cases:

1. Any researcher can publish his or her experiment data as single unit of experiment in RDF format using this ontology. Ideally, a new easy-to-use self-publishing tool specifically designed for such purpose will encourage the use of the ontology. However, any ontology editor can be used to create RDF content. Because data in such format can be searched by semantic web search engine, it offers a new channel for data sharing and retrieval that will accelerate scientific discovery as well as increase the researcher’s visibility.
2. Anyone can search for all experiments available on the web at various property levels. This use case requires a search engine that aggregates published experiment data in RDF format. Compared to traditional literature search, this semantic web search engine will provide much more relevant information.

1. Define requirements for representing experiment and related information.
2. Define specifications for ontology that will be used for self-publishing experiment (SPE).
3. Create SPE ontology file in owl or rdf.