Addressing standardization and semantics in an electronic lab notebook for multidisciplinary use: LabIMotion

Abstract

This work presents the LabIMotion extension for the Chemotion Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN), expanding its capabilities from organic chemistry to support interdisciplinary research and enabling the description of workflows. LabIMotion enhances documentation by introducing customizable components structured across three levels—Elements, Segments, and Datasets—enabling flexible, hierarchical organization and reuse of data. Through the integration of links to ontologies, the extension ensures precise, machine-readable data, promoting interoperability and adherence to FAIR principles. The extension features an intuitive, user-friendly interface that allows researchers to easily create new ELN content by leveraging a set of customizable, generic methods. Scientists can set up new data fields, can link data fields, or establish workflows, and the extension translates those needs directly into usable functionality at their command. Through this high degree of flexibility, a wide range of specific research needs can be met. The LabIMotion Hub plays a crucial role in distributing and updating components, fostering standardization, and enabling collaborative development within scientific communities. These advancements significantly improve the ELN's adaptability, usability, and relevance across various research disciplines.

Scientific contribution

This work demonstrates how research data management systems can be designed to support discipline-specific requirements in chemistry research while offering a high flexibility and interoperability to deal with interdisciplinary work. The developed software, LabIMotion, offers a versatile approach for integrating novel research aspects into a research data environment, fostering bottom-up processes for defining schemas and standardizing scientific workflows. In particular, the software’s support for community-driven extensions, combined with a clear definition of content and its assignment to ontology terms, provides unique advantages for creating adaptable tools suited to the complexities of the scientific environment.