# Presentation: 215441

## Building an Information Framework for Neuroscience

**Building an Information Framework for Neuroscience**
**Friday, October 19**
**Conference Room E1/E2****Natcher Building, NIH Campus****Bethesda, MD**

## Where we started and what we wanted (March 25, 2005)

- The goal of this contract is to develop an inventory of information and other resources within a neuroscience information framework (NIF) that enables neuroscientists to identify those resources most relevant to their particular queries and research needs. The framework will enable concept-based queries (spanning multiple levels of biological organization and function) within and across the diverse types of information constituting the
- inventory. The inventory within its framework is meant to be more than a "database of databases”. The framework will use innovative technologies and approaches for guiding, formulating, and performing queries, and
- providing rapid, informative, and clear responses. The basic neuroscience information framework developed under this contract also will be sufficiently flexible to be scaled and extended in the future to offer additional
- functionalities supporting a greater information base.

- _From the Broad Agency Announcement_

## Where we are now:

** **Based on the assessments and solutions identified in the White Paper, this objective is to **develop and deploy* a neuroscience information architecture** that employs one or more strategies to identify information resources important to neuroscience research....
- Offerors should develop criteria and a plan for benchmark and usability testing, and allow an adequate period for such testing. ...Prior to contract completion, the Offeror shall perform a demonstration of the delivered framework including the ability to scale and extend, and satisfaction of usability and benchmarking criteria as proposed in the Statement of Work.

- _From the Broad Agency Announcement_

**Where we are now:**

- *Deploy = to put into use or action

## What was proposed:

- Three levels of interoperability that NIF resources can conform to:
*Resource description - *resources that only describe themselves using the NIF terminology without exposing detailed information about their content. (Used by NIF Database Resource)
- II) *Resource content description*—resources that describe themselves using the NIF terminology and expose detailed information about their content in terms of the terminology. (Used by NIF Database Resource)
- III) *Resource content retrieval—*resources that describe themselves using the NIF terminology, expose detailed information about their content in terms of the terminology and expose information as to how these data can be extracted (e.g. connection and export schema information for a relational database) (Used by NIF Database Mediator)

## NIF Components: Registration Interface

## NIF System Components

## NIF Structured Query Interface

## Role of Textpresso in Project

- Exploration as a tool for discovering specialized experimental resources
- Exploration as a tool for creating, populating, and curating new, specialized
- neuroscience databases
- Exploration of feasibility and productivity of implementing categorical concept-based
- queries

## Projected Course:

-  Iterative updating and maintenance will be informed by a
- public Web site for comments by beta testers, bug reporting and a private wiki or equivalent for logging”

- But NIF Development is proceeding within the context
- of related activities:

- The Open Portal project of NCI
- Neurocommons
- PubMed Plus Electronic Publishing Initiative
- International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility
- Semantic Web for the Life Sciences
- Science.gov and worldwidescience.gov

- National Centers in Biomedical Computing, “Yellow pages resourceome project” (and biositemaps)
- National Center for Biomedical Ontologies
- Other terminology efforts: eg. Ontonolgy of Biomedical Investigations
- MacArthur and Sloan Foundations semantically oriented “Tree of Life Project”
- Blueprint NITRC project
- ...and many others

## Previously Planned Purpose of Meeting:

- Brief NIH staff, resource providers and potential NIH intramural and extramural beta testers on the components, design and function of a resource information framework
- (2) Explore use cases to test the query and registration functions of NIF and to better ascertain resource requirements for extending and maintaining a framework system at different levels of interoperability
-  (3) Explore possible synergies among approaches, data sets, and other relevant issues, with other key initiatives
- (4) discuss possible hosts/sponsors of a neuroscience resource information framework

- Who are Today’s Attendees?

- NIH program, library and intramural staff
- NIH Initiative Leaders (BISTI, TOP, Biomedical Knowledge Repository)
- NIH NIF Project Team and Steering Group Liaisons
- NIF Developers and Consortium Members
- Resource Providers, Interested parties from other Agencies
- Leaders of Other Initiatives (Neurocommons, PubMedPlus, Semantic Web, etc)