Title
Methods for Specifying Scientific Data Standards and Modeling Relationships with Applications to Neuroscience.
Abstract
Neuroscience continues to experience a tremendous growth in data; in terms of the volume and variety of data, the velocity at which data is acquired, and in turn the veracity of data. These challenges are a serious impediment to sharing of data, analyses, and tools within and across labs. Here, we introduce BRAINformat, a novel data standardization framework for the design and management of scientific data formats. The BRAINformat library defines application independent design concepts and modules that together create a general framework for standardization of scientific data. We describe the formal specification of scientific data standards, which facilitates sharing and verification of data and formats. We introduce the concept of Managed Objects, enabling semantic components of data formats to be specified as self-contained units, supporting modular and reusable design of data format components and file storage. We also introduce the novel concept of Relationship Attributes for modeling and use of semantic relationships between data objects. Based on these concepts we demonstrate the application of our framework to design and implement a standard format for electrophysiology data and show how data standardization and relationship-modeling facilitate data analysis and sharing. The format uses HDF5, enabling portable, scalable, and self-describing data storage and integration with modern high-performance computing for data-driven discovery. The BRAINformat library is open source, easy-to-use, and provides detailed user and developer documentation and is freely available at: https://bitbucket.org/oruebel/brainformat.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.3389/fninf.2016.00048
FRONTIERS IN NEUROINFORMATICS
Keywords
Field
DocType
data format specification,relationship modeling,electrophysiology,neuroscience
Data warehouse,Data science,Data mining,Data modeling,Data transformation,Neuroinformatics,Hierarchical Data Format,Neuroscience,Computer science,Data mapping,Data management,Standardization
Journal
Volume
Citations 
PageRank 
10
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Oliver Rübel110311.78
Max Dougherty241.08
Prabhat345634.79
Peter Denes430.76
David Conant500.34
Edward F. Chang6249.78
Kristofer E Bouchard7188.99