Dr. Daniel Gardner, professor of physiology and biophysics and professor of physiology and biophysics in neuroscience, has been granted the highly prestigious and competitive contract to build the new Neuroscience Information Framework for the National Institutes of Health. The project will be led by Dr. Gardner on behalf of Weill Cornell Medical College.
The Framework will be a clearinghouse for neuroscientists to formulate questions and direct those questions to one or more public information resources, allowing researchers to locate if or where the disparate information exists. Users will have access to a number of neuroscience databases and sites that archive such data.
Dr. Daniel Gardner and Weill Cornell Medical College have been granted the contract to build the Neuroscience Information Framework for the NIH.
Planned as being more than just a "database of databases," the Neuroscience Information Framework will use new technology that will enable end-users to quickly and efficiently upload and download information. It will enable concept-based queries (spanning multiple levels of biological organization and function) within and across the diverse types of information constituting the information inventory. In addition, the Framework's "frame" will be sufficiently flexible to be scaled and extended in the future, offering additional functionalities supporting a greater information base. All work will be open source—the technology and access methods will be made freely available.
"Our goal is to make data and findings available to researchers and other interested parties in order to promote a greater understanding of brain function and disease," said Dr. Gardner. The Neurodatabase Gateway, an existing online resource maintained by the Society for Neuroscience, will serve as the NIH Framework's model. The initial 15-month exploratory stage of the project, budgeted at more than half a million dollars, is currently underway. The Neuroscience Information Framework's building is scheduled for Phase II in 2007.
Weill Cornell Medical College and the Laboratory of Neuroinformatics, which Dr. Gardner leads, are the prime contractors selected by the NIH to oversee the project. (The Laboratory presently maintains neurodatabase.org and brainml.org, sites for researchers to contribute and access annotated neuroscientific data.) Subcontracts have been granted to Yale University, University of California at San Diego, George Mason University and the California Institute of Technology. Nine other sites are contributing expertise and methods to the project. The Neuroscience Information Framework is an effort in conjunction with and approved by the Society of Neuroscience, which is a 37,000-member major scientific organization, and is funded in whole or in part with federal funds from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services. For more information, visit neuroscienceblueprint.nih.gov/funding.html.
Photo by Amelia Panico.