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Mission and activities of the INCF Electrophysiology Data Sharing Task Force

Friedrich Sommer1*, Thomas Wachtler2, Andrew Davison3, Michael Denker4, Jeffrey Grethe5, Sonja Grün6, Kenneth Harris7, Colin Ingram8, Marja-Leena Linne9, Bengt Ljungquist10, John Miller11, Roman Mouček12, Hyrum Sessions13, Gordon Shepherd14, Leslie Smith15, Jeff Teeters1 and Shiro Usui16
  • 1 UC Berkeley, United States
  • 2 LMU Munich, Germany
  • 3 CNRS, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
  • 4 INM-6, Research Center Julich, Germany
  • 5 UCSD, United States
  • 6 INM-6. Julich, Germany
  • 7 Imperial College London, United Kingdom
  • 8 University of Newcastle, United Kingdom
  • 9 Tampere Institute of Technology, Finland
  • 10 Lund University, Sweden
  • 11 Montana State University, United States
  • 12 Univ. of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czechia
  • 13 Blackrock Microsystems, United States
  • 14 Yale, United States
  • 15 University of Stirling, Scotland, United Kingdom
  • 16 RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan

Each year, an increasingly vast amount of neuroscience electrophysiology data is collected and reported in journal publications. However, almost none of these data are accessible to the community of theorists building integrative models of neuronal systems or to experimentalists planning new experiments. To help change this situation, the INCF Electrophysiology Data Sharing Task Force, was established in 2010 to develop recommendations that enable and expand the sharing of electrophysiology data. The issues the task force considers are the required metadata, data formats, object models for accessing data, unique identifiers for data, infrastructure and software, and how to promote data sharing. This poster summarizes the activities of the task force for the purpose of getting feedback and to publicize related resources.
Metadata. A number of areas in bioscience have developed minimal metadata standards that have been adopted both by database curators and publishers. Our aim is to examine the issues around developing metadata standards for neurophysiology, including methods for efficient acquisition, description of stimuli and neural data, formats, and interoperability. Some of the current systems considered are: CARMEN's MINI http://www.carmen.org.uk/standards, YOGO http://yogo.msu.montana.edu , odML http://www.g-node.org/projects/odml , and neurolex http://neurolex.org .

Data formats. The large variety of data formats in electrophysiology poses great challenges to efficient data sharing. The task force has set up a web page on tools for reading and converting between formats http://datasharing.incf.org/ep/Converters and, in order to develop unifying standards, is examining techniques used by a variety of systems, including Neuroshare http://neuroshare.org , NDF http://www.carmen.org.uk/standards/CarmenDataSpecs.pdf , MIEN http://mien.msu.montana.edu/ , NEO http://packages.python.org/neo/ , and OMNI http://code.google.com/p/incf-omni/ .

Publisher statements. The task force is collecting information about existing policies at publishers and funding agencies regarding requirements that data be made available and will coordinate with the INCF neuroimaging task force to form recommendations.

Data set identifiers. The task force has discussed systems of persistent identifiers for data that would allow shared data to be referenced in standardized ways. Two are DOIs using datacite, and Life Science Identifiers, which are used by the CARMEN project.

Keywords: Electrophysiology, data sharing, Neuroscience, data standards, incf

Conference: 5th INCF Congress of Neuroinformatics, Munich, Germany, 10 Sep - 12 Sep, 2012.

Presentation Type: Poster

Topic: Neuroinformatics

Citation: Sommer F, Wachtler T, Davison A, Denker M, Grethe J, Grün S, Harris K, Ingram C, Linne M, Ljungquist B, Miller J, Mouček R, Sessions H, Shepherd G, Smith L, Teeters J and Usui S (2014). Mission and activities of the INCF Electrophysiology Data Sharing Task Force. Front. Neuroinform. Conference Abstract: 5th INCF Congress of Neuroinformatics. doi: 10.3389/conf.fninf.2014.08.00088

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Received: 21 Mar 2013; Published Online: 27 Feb 2014.

* Correspondence: Dr. Friedrich Sommer, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-3198, United States, fsommer@berkeley.edu