Bill of Experiments: A Tool for Scientific Knowledge Management*

This paper presents the Bill of Experiments, a concept aiming at Knowledge Management of Scientific Experiments, representing knowledge about and used by scientific experiments; and a first prototype of its implementation. Experience drawn from environments for scientific and engineering software development and reuse suggests that this is a promising approach for scientific knowledge representation and reuse. In analogy with data modeling concepts, such as the classical "Bill of Materials", a recursive aggregate, we propose "Bill of Experiments". An abstract workflow is used to represent the relationship between: data, models and experiments, as well as the instantiated workflow represents a study case of relating data, models, programs, institutions and researchers. The prototype translates the workflow into production rules to be processed by the inference engine built into a relational DBMS. It will be integrated to the SPeCS environment as a tool for reuse of models, programs, data and workflow definitions.