1st INCF Workshop on Development of a Community-Based Neuroscience Encyclopedia

Abstract

The integration of neuroscience data is an extremely difficult challenge but presents an attractive opportunity to aid progress in brain research. True understanding of the brain can only be achieved through the integration and understanding of data of different scale and type. Data integration at the semantic level is facilitated by robust ontologies that cross neuroscientific domains. To aid progress in this domain, the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) Program on the Ontologies of Neural Structures (PONS), in conjunction with the Neuroscience Informatics Framework (NIF), hosted a workshop to discuss a strategy for developing and deploying a neuroscience community based encyclopedia. The aim for this encyclopedia is to provide a semantically organized forum that is built on the latest appropriate technologies and resources for the neuroscience community to develop and maintain ontologies with clear definitions and links to relevant literature, data, models and other resources. The attendees of the workshop agreed: An encyclopedia-like semantic wiki for neuroscience could be a useful method to integrate multiscale data It would be both feasible and desirable to integrate some of the resources represented at the workshop into this wiki INCF should pursue the creation of a prototype that builds on existing wiki resources; the group made several recommendations on how to proceed