Standards to Define Experiments Related to the BRAIN Initiative

Presenter:

Gregory K. Farber, Ph.D.
Office of Technology Development and Coordination

Goal:

The goal of this concept is to support researchers in the development of standards that describe experimental protocols that are being conducted as part of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative. It is expected that the researchers will solicit community input at all stages of the process.  It is recommended that the first step of standard development will involve sharing data between different key groups in the experimental community in order to ensure that the developing standard will include the approaches to data collection utilized by the groups collecting the data. The developed standard is expected to be made widely available.

Rationale:

The BRAIN Initiative informatics infrastructure program is managed for the BRAIN Initiative by NIMH. The program has three components: data archives, data standards, and software for data analysis or data integration. The data archive component of the infrastructure is now complete. NIMH has funded archives for each of the instrument/device types that the BRAIN Initiative is supporting. There are still some needs in the data standards area as well as in the integration/analysis software area.