Hi,

Nice to see this kind of use cases for modeling here, that go beyond the realm of software. I think there is a lot of potential there for Pharo and live coding.

“Lab Notebook”: This one is a bit fuzzy - sorry if the intention is unclear. During a case investigation (IMHO an investigation is also part of “the” model) different findings (e.g. data, visualisations) need to be documented. My impression from Moose is that you “play” with the data (in inspectors) until you come to an conclusion based on an assessment. Once you have the result you can decide and tackle the next problem. In my context I’d need to document not only the result but also the way taken to achieve it. Maybe something simple like accumulating the research way through all inspector panes would be enough. I’m not quite sure though.

So how do I document different “results (e.g. data/visualizations) including the “way” they were achieved?

About the notebook part, you could use Grafoscopio [1][2], which started with what moose provided as a quick prototype, but it's being extended to bring more powerful interactive documentation and is being used to document several research processes, as you can see on [2]. All documents there has been written with Grafoscopio and exported to PDF via pandoc. Is my own bridge between the document/scripting world and the objects world, combining prose and code, which has been pretty useful when we're learning something or understanding the problem and can be used for others to follow our steps and creating interactive tutorials (like the ones we use in our Data Week workshop).

It's is my first package on Pharo/Smalltalk (before that I used only Etoys, Bots Inc and Scratch), so is full of rookie code everywhere. But the more confident I become, the more the code improves and I think that Grafoscopio could benefit greatly of having more people seeing the code, making comments or commits on it.

Let me know if it helps.

Cheers,

Offray