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Focused Review ARTICLE

Digital atlases as a framework for data sharing

Jyl Boline , Erh-Fang Lee and Arthur W. Toga^*

Department of Neurology, Laboratory of NeuroImaging, School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Digital brain atlases are useful as references, analytical tools, and as a data integration framework. As a result, they and their supporting tools are being recognized as potentially useful resources in the movement toward data sharing. Several projects are connecting infrastructure to these tools which facilitate sharing, managing, and retrieving data of different types, scale, and even location. With these in place, we have the ability to combine, analyze, and interpret these data in a manner not previously possible, opening the door to examine issues in new and exciting ways, and potentially leading to speedier discovery of answers as well as new questions about the brain. Here we discuss recent efforts in the use of digital mouse atlases for data sharing.

Keywords:

atlas, neuroinformatics, anatomical framework, data management, gene expression, mouse, brain

Citation:

Boline J, Lee E-F and Toga AW (2008). Digital atlases as a framework for data sharing.Front. Neurosci.2:1, doi: 10.3389/neuro.01.012.2008

Received:

7 April 2008;

Paper pending published:

22 May 2008;

Accepted:

22 May 2008;

Published online:

15 July 2008.

Edited by:

Jan G. Bjaalie, International Neuroinformatics Coordination Facility, Sweden; University of Oslo, Norway

Reviewed by:

Gregor Eichele, Baylor College of Medicine, USA
Albert Burger, MRC Human Genetics Unit, UK; Department of Computer Science, Heriot-Watt University, UK

© 2008 Boline, Lee and Toga. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

*Correspondence:

Arthur W. Toga, Department of Neurology, Laboratory of NeuroImaging, School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, 635 Charles E. Young Drive South, Los Angeles, California, 90095-7334, USA. e-mail: toga@loni.ucla.edu