Capturing Intent and Rationale for Linked Science: Design Patterns as a Resource for Linked Laboratory Experiments

The notion of design patterns, after architect Christopher Alexander, provides a powerful way to capture and describe reusable design knowledge for complex domains. In this position paper we present the idea of design patterns for molecular biology experiments, and discuss how they may be utilized to support experimental design reuse, reproducibility, and a platform for linking experiments. Design patterns provide an alternate terminology and interpretive framework that can capture expert experience and intent that is critical yet missing from current representations of lab methods that utilize web ontologies and computational workflows. We outline an approach to making design patterns a first class entity in support of linked experiments on the web and provide a glimpse of potential applications of laboratory design pattern knowledge.