Experimental technique

[RKrahl]

The ExPaNDS project has developed PaNET – The Photon and Neutron Experimental Techniques Ontology. I assume other (experiment performing) scientific communities might have similar vocabularies for their techniques. Obviously, it would be interesting to link an instrument with the experimental technique(s) it has been designed to use. Surprisingly enough, there doesn't seem to be a proper place in our schema to do that.

Experimental techniques seem to be somewhat complementary to MeasuredVariable: the latter is the physical observable that the instrument records. The technique goes way beyond that, it describes the physical phenomenon that the instrument makes use of or the measurement protocol it performs in order to make an observation. MeasuredVariable is fair enough for simple instruments like temperature sensors. But it is too limited to describe complex instruments such as an experimental station for x-ray absorption spectroscopy.

Interestingly enough, it is possible to include the link from the instrument to the experimental technique in the DataCite schema: the subject property in DataCite is mostly used to just add keywords. But using its subproperties, it is versatile enough to also establish the link to a PaNET term. I did that excercise for one of our instrument DOIs (see the DataCite XML metadata):

  <subjects>
    <subject>BER II</subject>
    <subject>Diffraction</subject>
    <subject>Neutron source</subject>
    <subject schemeURI="http://purl.org/pan-science/PaNET/" subjectScheme="The Photon and Neutron Experimental Techniques Ontology" valueURI="http://purl.org/pan-science/PaNET/PaNET01217">neutron diffraction</subject>
  </subjects>