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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.bowerlabs.ai/llms.txt

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Shipped 2026-03-15 · Workspace Notes describe what you did. Protocols describe how you do it. They’re different things, and Bower now treats them differently.

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What’s new

  • Protocol artifact type — a dedicated artifact alongside notes and attachments. Protocols use the same rich text editor as notes, but live in their own protocol library so you can browse your standard operating procedures without filtering them out of your experiment history.
  • First-class URLs and routing — protocols have their own detail page, their own breadcrumbs, and their own sharing model.
  • Knowledge graph relationships — protocols connect to the collections that use them and the notes that ran them, with bidirectional links Bird can follow when answering questions.
  • Foundations for provenance — the protocol relationship type is the first piece of a richer ontology we’re building inside the knowledge graph.

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Why this matters

A protocol is the institutional knowledge of your lab. It outlives individual experiments, individual researchers, sometimes individual projects. Treating protocols as just-another-note buried that distinction; treating them as a first-class type makes them findable, shareable, and — when you ask Bird about an experiment — automatically linked to the procedure it followed.

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Methods vs. protocols

A method is a published, high-level scientific technique (e.g. LA-ICP-MS). A protocol is the detailed, operational guide your specific lab uses to perform that method. Bower’s protocol artifact is the second of these — an operational artifact, not a literature artifact.