Git-revisioned protocols and sharing is nice, and is one step up from the current situation in sharing and developing lab protocols. DIYbio as a group has been

Git-revisioned protocols and sharing is nice, and is one step up from the current situation in sharing and developing lab protocols. DIYbio as a group has been eyeballing more programmatic ways of specifying protocols, either through structured document formats (like XML) or parsed languages like in Microsoft's Biocoder project: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/india/projects/biocoder/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/india/projects/biocod... or xml: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/pcr.xml http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/pcr.xml Still, I think this isn't a solved problem. The API for Biocoder feels all wrong for numerous reasons; on top of that, nobody is going to learn a new API, library or programming language just to write down a protocol, unless they are being paid, or there's some really compelling reason to do so (which, there isn't). Without something changing here, you just end up with a giant corpus of protocols like we presently have, without metadata and basically useless unless you already know what you want or need, or have the time to manually check and double check everything in each protocol you might be using. One of the advantages of machine parsable protocols is being able to query against your lab inventory... http://diyhpl.us/cgit/skdb/plain/doc/BOMs/diybio-equipment.yaml http://diyhpl.us/cgit/skdb/plain/doc/BOMs/diybio-equipment.y... I should also point out that Jonathan Cline was working on parsing plaintext protocols a while back: Don’t Train the Biology Robot: Have the Machine Read the Protocol and Automate Itself http://88proof.com/synthetic_biology/blog/archives/290 http://88proof.com/synthetic_biology/blog/archives/290 So it's just unclear how you plan to fix or assist in some of these dynamics, at this point, or which specific problems you're solving. I also posted this to the diybio people: http://groups.google.com/group/diybio/browse_thread/thread/19df187ef1014735 http://groups.google.com/group/diybio/browse_thread/thread/1...