NIX – Neuroscience information exchange format

Abstract

The purpose of this document is to solicit community feedback on the Neuroscience information exchange format (NIX), a data standard for electrophysiology. This document contains the INCF standards and best practices committee's review of NIX, and the criteria in which it was evaluated (open, FAIR, testing and implementation, governance, adoption and use, stability and support, and comparison to similar standards). For the next 60 days, we are seeking community feedback on NIX. About NIX: The NIX data model allows storing fully annotated scientific datasets, i.e. the data together with rich metadata and their relations in a consistent, comprehensive format. Although developed originally for electrophysiology data, neither the data model nor the model for metadata are domain-specific to electrophysiology, but both models can be linked to predefined or custom terminologies which enables the user to give elements of the models a domain-specific, semantic context. Its aim is to achieve standardization by providing a common data structure and APIs for a multitude of data types and use cases, focused on but not limited to neuroscience. In contrast to most other approaches, the NIX approach is to achieve this flexibility with a minimum set of data model elements. The NIX project includes native I/O libraries for C++ and Python, language bindings for Java and MATLAB and a viewer for NIX data files, although the HDF5 viewer can also be used.