Deconstructing The Tea Ceremony

In parallel with our practical tea making sessions we started to analyse the underlying processes of experiments. This is the first stage towards building an experiment planner and the matching storage systems. An RDF graph was produced summarising the processes involved in making tea.

The Tea Process RDF Graph

From this we began to distinguish the phases of an experiment as

More Reality. Less Tea

Making tea taught us a great deal but the realities of even a simple real chemistry experiment reveal much more about the stages of process involved. To this end we have produced the RDF graph for a first year undergraduate procedure for making aspirin. The graph is below and the hi-res full image is here

The RDF Graph For Aspirin

As can be seen the experiment does map into the four phases.

We are now in the process of defining the ontologies required to represent all of the processes, events and objects that occur in experiments. From this we will be able to define the things that we need to capture and map those into the various interface applications and pervasive systems we are building. The RDF design process is ongoing and internal users can view the work in progress here.

Gareth Hughes

The Smart Tea Project