Data Revival – Making the intangible tangible: The journey from lab notebook to digital insight
The recording from our fifth PSDI webinar is now available on our Youtube Channel! https://youtu.be/yq-lhlYbJ4U
In this webinar Samuel Munday presented about extraction of knowledge from lab books, which is being explored as part of our Pathfinder 2 & 3 activities in conjunction with spin out company Data Revival.
If you weren’t able to attend the webinar live, then check this recording out. The slides are available on zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10808354
Abstract:The University of Southampton’s chemistry department has accumulated a wealth of chemical knowledge over the years, some of which has been captured in over 2000 lab books. The vast majority of these have been sat gathering dust in a cupboard for a long time, unable to be destroyed due to both the value of knowledge they hold and their importance for Health and Safety reporting. However, this knowledge is intangible and difficult to access, offering no value to the department whilst taking up space and presenting a fire risk. We present our work on turning this unstructured resource into a structured accessible database that holds FAIR data open to analytics and intelligent search. Our system utilises AI-driven natural language processing techniques, as well as chemical structure recognition, to extract all the types of chemical information required to create a useful, searchable database. This database unlocks 3000 chemist years of knowledge and enables more efficient and accurate future research. In this webinar we discuss the process of digitising such an archive effectively, the AI tools we have created to work with such unstructured knowledge at scale, the utility of the digital database created for the chemistry department, and the feedback received from the department on the system’s potential for further development.
