Document
NOT PEER REVIEWED
Policy document
Call for community review of Neurodata Without Borders: Neurophysiology (NWB:N) 2.0--a data standard forneurophysiology
Published 09 Oct 2019
(https://doi.org/10.7490/f1000research.1117538.1)
Author Affiliations
Copyright © 2019 Martone M et al. This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Published 09 Oct 2019
Policy document
Call for community review of Neurodata Without Borders: Neurophysiology (NWB:N) 2.0--a data standard forneurophysiology
[version 1; not peer reviewed]Author Affiliations
Abstract
Competing Interests
No competing interests were disclosed
Keywords
Neurophysiology, data standard, data sharing, Neurodata Without Borders, NWB:N 2.0, INCF
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NWB shows many promising hallmarks, including a strong core team, extensive community engagement, and notable early adopters. Nonetheless, my recommendation would be to hold off on endorsement at this time. While there is significant institutional support for NWB, the organic user adoption appears to be limited to date. Compared to the other endorsed standard, BIDS, the adoption of NWB continues to trail by an order of magnitude by our observations. Additionally, NWB strives for finer-grained file-level data standardization as compared to the folder-structure standardization of BIDS. This leads to inherently greater technical complexity, and the adoption rate thus may never reach the same level. But reaching a similar scale of 100s of datasets seems achievable in the upcoming years. My recommendation is that the meaning and value of an INCF endorsement would be considerably greater upon reaching such a milestone.
Our early experiences working with NWB datasets suggests at least some of the technical complexity could be tamed through further work on the usability and capability of the high-level interface layers, e.g. by using expressive data constructs (such as map containers) and taking advantage of advanced indexing techniques (such as overloading subsref) for the MATLAB interface. We are available to the project teams to review these and other possibilities to help spur the standard towards greater adoption.
NWB shows many promising hallmarks, including a strong core team, extensive community engagement, and notable early adopters. Nonetheless, my recommendation would be to hold off on endorsement at this time. While there is significant institutional support for NWB, the organic user adoption appears to be limited to date. Compared to the other endorsed standard, BIDS, the adoption of NWB continues to trail by an order of magnitude by our observations. Additionally, NWB strives for finer-grained file-level data standardization as compared to the folder-structure standardization of BIDS. This leads to inherently greater technical complexity, and the adoption rate thus may never reach the same level. But reaching a similar scale of 100s of datasets seems achievable in the upcoming years. My recommendation is that the meaning and value of an INCF endorsement would be considerably greater upon reaching such a milestone.
Our early experiences working with NWB datasets suggests at least some of the technical complexity could be tamed through further work on the usability and capability of the high-level interface layers, e.g. by using expressive data constructs (such as map containers) and taking advantage of advanced indexing techniques (such as overloading subsref) for the MATLAB interface. We are available to the project teams to review these and other possibilities to help spur the standard towards greater adoption.
We are currently developing a Neo IO module for NWB:N 2.0, which will allow Neo data structures to be both read from and written to NWB files. This module is expected to ship with Neo 0.9, due for release in mid-2020.
We are currently developing a Neo IO module for NWB:N 2.0, which will allow Neo data structures to be both read from and written to NWB files. This module is expected to ship with Neo 0.9, due for release in mid-2020. READ LESS
We have recently renewed our funding for OSB with the specific aim to allow experimental neuroscience data to be shared and interactively analysed on the platform beside simulation results. For this we required a standardised format for expressing a wide range of experimental data. NWB was the natural choice for this, and our interactions with the format to date have proven very successful. Having a well documented standard, libraries for reading and writing in multiple formats, and an active community of users has helped us convert a number of datasets to the format, as well as create an initial application for graphically interacting with the contents of NWB files: http://nwbexplorer.opensourcebrain.org. We would very much support this format becoming an endorsed standard at the INCF so that others will be encouraged to use NWB for sharing the outputs of their research.
We have recently renewed our funding for OSB with the specific aim to allow experimental neuroscience data to be shared and interactively analysed on the platform beside simulation results. For this we required a standardised format for expressing a wide range of experimental data. NWB was the natural choice for this, and our interactions with the format to date have proven very successful. Having a well documented standard, libraries for reading and writing in multiple formats, and an active community of users has helped us convert a number of datasets to the format, as well as create an initial application for graphically interacting with the contents of NWB files: http://nwbexplorer.opensourcebrain.org. We would very much support this format becoming an endorsed standard at the INCF so that others will be encouraged to use NWB for sharing the outputs of their research.
We strongly believe that the adoption of the NWB format will enable the development of a large suite of standardized analysis and visualization tools that will improve the current status of neuroscience research, especially in terms of reproducibility of results and shareability of the data.
We strongly believe that the adoption of the NWB format will enable the development of a large suite of standardized analysis and visualization tools that will improve the current status of neuroscience research, especially in terms of reproducibility of results and shareability of the data. READ LESS
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