Portolan Software

◆ Portolan Software

Charts for AI agents doing science.

Two efforts, for science that keeps what it learns. One records what did not work, so the next agent does not repeat it. The other draws what a paper showed and what it left open, so the next experiment starts from the gap.

Negative-Results Record · schema v0.2.5, nine pilot studies Discourse graphs · four sets drawn from papers, one from records

01 Two efforts

A record of what failed, and a drawing of what is left open.

A

Negative-Results Record

A provenance-tagged registry of negative results and dead-end discovery traces. Each lab keeps its own node; one open node, the commons, holds what labs release. A record carries its claim, its evidence, its controls, its sensitivity and its licence, and an informativeness rule decides whether a negative counts as evidence of absence or only as a measurement that failed.

  • Schema v0.2.5, open for comment
  • Pilot nine studies, 49 records, 217 findings
  • Licence of published records CC BY 4.0
Enter the section Read the schema

B

Discourse graphs

A published paper drawn as the question it asked, the hypothesis it held, the experiments it ran, the results each produced and the issues it left open, every result tied to the sentence in the paper it came from. Each open issue is checked against the work that has cited the paper since, and given a proposed experiment, with a control and a sensitivity statement, for a researcher to push back on.

  • Drawn from papers NEJM 6 · SAGE 8 · PINNs 7 · ACM 11
  • Drawn from pilot records 8
  • Sources CC BY papers and author manuscripts
Enter the section The NEJM set

Where they meet. The issue a graph leaves open is the question a registry of negatives is searched with, and the eight pilot studies are drawn both ways: as records, and as graphs over those records.

02 About

About Portolan

Portolan Software is an initiative, not yet a company, that publishes its schema and pilot plan openly so that laboratories, agent operators, publishers, and funders can evaluate the idea on its merits.

The people behind it have spent decades building the platforms that publish and host peer-reviewed research, including the version, correction, and retraction workflows this project depends on. If the pilot is funded, the initiative incorporates and hires from that community.

A commons that asks publishers to expose status and laboratories to share their failures has to belong to neither. Portolan is independent of every publisher and content platform whose records it checks, and it is operated in the United States.

03 Contact

Contact

Email [email protected]. Comments on the schema and on the graphs are welcome at the same address.