There is an increasing effort in scientific communities to create shared vocabularies and ontologies. These build the foundation of a semantically annotated knowledge graph which can surface all research data and enable holistic data analysis across various data sources and research domains.

Making machine-generated data available in such a knowledge graph is typically done by setting up scripts and data transformation pipelines which automatically add semantic annotations. Unfortunately, a good solution for capturing manually recorded (meta)data in such a knowledge graph is still lacking.

Herbie, the semantic electronic lab notebook and research database developed at Hereon, fills this gap. In Herbie, users can enter all (meta)data on their experiments in customized web forms. And once submitted, Herbie automatically adds semantic annotations and stores everything directly in the knowledge graph. So it is as easy to use as a spreadsheet but produces FAIR data without any additional post-processing work. Herbie is configured using the standardized SHACL Shapes Constraint Language and furthermore builds on well-established frameworks in the RDF ecosystem like RDFS, OWL, or RO-Crate.

We will showcase this approach through a typical example of a production and analysis chain as can be found in many scientific domains.