Supporting Online Material for the paper "The Automation of Science"

  1. Document describing Supporting Online Material (PDF, 1.8M)
  2. Video demonstration of the Robot Scientist Adam at work. Robotlarge.mov, 47M, Quicktime format (If you need assistance to view this, we suggest VLC, a capable cross platform media player)
  3. The formalised description (in Datalog) of Robot Scientist investigations. The Datalog files were generated using an ontology "LABORS" (an is-a hierarchy, a set of relations, and a set of restrictions for the classes) and a MySQL database which stores structure, observations and results of the investigations. The Datalog files are plain text, with a Prolog filename extension (.pl), and can be viewed in any text editor. Relationships between research units have been amended (17/5/10) and are now "has_part" relationships rather than "has_proposition" relationships.
  4. The resources for the Robot Scientist investigations. (note: the Datalog files have links to these files).
  5. The click-through example of the Datalog formalism: Automated study of enzyme EC2.6.1.39. Version for Internet Explorer 6. Colour version for all other browsers. Version without JavaScript (non-interactive).
  6. LABORS - an ontolology for the LABOratory automated Robot Scientists. The ontology defines only is-a hierarchy of the classes used for the description of the robot scientist investigations and a set of the relations for the datalog representation. LABORS.owl 33K
  7. Pictures of the Robot Scientist Adam.
  8. Figures.

Author contributions

Authors listed alphabetically:
AI software (EB, KEW); automated experimentation (ADAM); bioinformatics (KEW, ML); comparative genomics (PP, SGO); database (AC, AS); growth curve analysis (ML, MY, JR); hardware (AC, AS, JR); manual experiments (AS, MM, MY, WA); ontology (AC, LNS, ML); statistics and data analysis (AC, AS, ML). RDK conceived the idea, directed the work and drafted the ms.