Years ago, when I hadn't yet completed the switch from the lab to computers, I used
http://www.protocol-online.org/ from time to time, which is, in my understanding, a similar project. Though checking it out just now indicates that not much has been going on there for the last couple of years. irollboozers already mentioned
http://openwetware.org/wiki/Main_Page as an alternative project with a wiki-style
interface. Those sites attracted some participants but it seems they never really went mainstream - should ask the wet lab people about this to confirm.
As I'm working in Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) now after a stint in the software industry, I'm actually shocked by the lack of standardization and documentation in the wet lab, which makes a thorough statistical data analysis so much harder. Few use electronic lab books and even fewer associate those with experimental data.
I think that is what is really missing, a push to easy-to-use electronic lab books that use open, machine- and human-readable formats and a straightforward way of associating these with the generated data. Upload these documented and annotated raw data to a central repository and you create a computational biologist's wet dream.
But that would require a huge amount of work to create the necessary ontologies...
As I'm working in Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) now after a stint in the software industry, I'm actually shocked by the lack of standardization and documentation in the wet lab, which makes a thorough statistical data analysis so much harder. Few use electronic lab books and even fewer associate those with experimental data.
I think that is what is really missing, a push to easy-to-use electronic lab books that use open, machine- and human-readable formats and a straightforward way of associating these with the generated data. Upload these documented and annotated raw data to a central repository and you create a computational biologist's wet dream.
But that would require a huge amount of work to create the necessary ontologies...