NeuroLex explained
NeuroLex is a lexicon of neuroscience concepts supported by the Neuroscience Information Framework project, which is funded by the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research.[1] It is the lexical part of the NIF knowledge base, and NeuroLex is intended to make literature review easier and ensure consistent terminology and usage across researchers for the topics of experimental, clinical, and transnational neuroscience, and for genetic and genomic resources.[2] It is structured as a semantic wiki, using Semantic MediaWiki.
NIF provides access to resources that are relevant to neuroscience, search strategies tailored to the field, and access to content that is traditionally "hidden" from web search engines. The Framework is an inventory of neuroscience databases, annotated and integrated with a unified system of biomedical terminology (i.e., NeuroLex). NIF supports concept-based queries across multiple scales of biological structure and multiple levels of biological function.
As part of the NIF, a search interface to many different sources of neuroscience information and data is provided. To make this search more effective, the NIF is constructing ontologies to help organize neuroscience concepts into category hierarchies, e.g. stating that a neuron is a cell. This will allow users to perform more effective searches and to organize and understand the information that is returned. But an important adjunct to this activity is to clearly define all of the terms that are used to describe data.
Content
The initial entries in NeuroLex were built from the NIFSTD ontologies, which subsumed an earlier vocabulary, BIRNLex. It currently contains concepts that span gross anatomy, cells of the nervous system, subcellular structures, diseases, functions, and techniques. NIF relies on community input to add more content and correct the current information.
See also
Further reading
NIF was featured in a special issue of Neuroinformatics, published in September 2008:
- Bug WJ, Ascoli GA, Grethe JS, Gupta A, Fennema-Notestine C, Laird AR, Larson SD, Rubin D, Shepherd GM, Turner JA, Martone ME . The NIFSTD and BIRNLex vocabularies: building comprehensive ontologies for neuroscience . Neuroinformatics . September 2008 . 6 . 3 . 175–94 . 18975148 . 10.1007/s12021-008-9032-z . 2743139 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20090212175317/http://neuinfo.org/about/vocabularies.shtml . February 12, 2009 .
- Gardner D, Akil H, Ascoli GA, Bowden DM, Bug W, Donohue DE, Goldberg DH, Grafstein B, Grethe JS, Gupta A, Halavi M, Kennedy DN, Marenco L, Martone ME, Miller PL, Müller HM, Robert A, Shepherd GM, Sternberg PW, Van Essen DC, Williams RW . The neuroscience information framework: a data and knowledge environment for neuroscience . Neuroinformatics . September 2008 . 6 . 3. 149–60 . 18946742. 10.1007/s12021-008-9024-z. 2661130.
- Gardner D, Goldberg DH, Grafstein B, Robert A, Gardner EP . Terminology for neuroscience data discovery: multi-tree syntax and investigator-derived semantics . Neuroinformatics . September 2008 . 6 . 3 . 161–74 . 18958630 . 10.1007/s12021-008-9029-7 . 2663521.
- Gupta A, Bug W, Marenco L, Qian X, Condit C, Rangarajan A, Müller HM, Miller PL, Sanders B, Grethe JS, Astakhov V, Shepherd G, Sternberg PW, Martone ME . Federated access to heterogeneous information resources in the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) . Neuroinformatics . September 2008 . 6 . 3 . 205–17 . 18958629 . 10.1007/s12021-008-9033-y . 2689790 .
- Halavi M, Polavaram S, Donohue DE, Hamilton G, Hoyt J, Smith KP, Ascoli GA . NeuroMorpho.Org implementation of digital neuroscience: dense coverage and integration with the NIF . Neuroinformatics . September 2008 . 6 . 3 . 241–52 . 18949582. 10.1007/s12021-008-9030-1. 2655120.
- Marenco L, Ascoli GA, Martone ME, Shepherd GM, Miller PL . The NIF LinkOut broker: a web resource to facilitate federated data integration using NCBI identifiers . Neuroinformatics . September 2008 . 6 . 3 . 219–27 . 18975149 . 10.1007/s12021-008-9025-y . 2704600 .
- Marenco L, Li Y, Martone ME, Sternberg PW, Shepherd GM, Miller PL . Issues in the design of a pilot concept-based query interface for the neuroinformatics information framework . Neuroinformatics . September 2008 . 6 . 3 . 229–39 . 18953674 . 10.1007/s12021-008-9035-9 . 2664632 .
- Müller HM, Rangarajan A, Teal TK, Sternberg PW . Textpresso for neuroscience: searching the full text of thousands of neuroscience research papers . Neuroinformatics . September 2008 . 6 . 3 . 195–204 . 18949581 . 10.1007/s12021-008-9031-0 . 2666735 .
External links
Notes and References
- Initial content for this article was adapted from the NeuroLex project which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
- Larson SD, Martone ME . NeuroLex.org: an online framework for neuroscience knowledge . Frontiers in Neuroinformatics . 7 . 18 . 2013 . 24009581 . 3757470 . 10.3389/fninf.2013.00018 . free .
