Boss: A cloud-based data archive for electron microscopy and x-ray microtomography

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ABSTRACT The generation of scientifically rich, high resolution neuroimaging volumes continues to increase in extent and rate due to the advancement of new Electron Microscopy (EM) and X-ray Microtomography (XRM) imaging sys- tems and data processing methodologies. With the increased availability of these technologies throughout the neuroscience community, and with sustained investment in new capability development and research program- ming from the BRAIN initiative, there is a current and continued need for community data storage to support future data generation, as well as to enable secondary science to help justify the extensive data collection and processing costs for these data and to propagate new scientific workflows and discoveries. Our BossDB data ecosystem currently serves as the BRAIN Initiative archive for high-resolution EM and XRM data, storing nearly one petabyte of public image, segmentation, and connectomics data for multiple BRAIN programs and for the broader neuroscience community. While the BossDB ecosystem continues to successfully support multiple research endeavors, as we enter into a new phase of BRAIN programming and a new generation of connectomics research with 10-100x larger petascale image volume collections, additional capabilities are required to ensure efficient and performant data storage, processing, annotation, and access for anticipated programmatic and community needs. Thus, in this proposed renewal of R24-MH114785 we will develop several performance and scalability improvements to BossDB: improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of data storage, support the integration of community tools and standards for data processing and annotation of large scale neuroimagery, and provide an optimized query service to make it easier to conduct secondary analyses of hosted datasets. Continued support of this critical community resource will make it possible for the world to leverage petabytes of free, publicly available, and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data in BossDB that the neuroscience community already depends on for connectomics research. The BossDB system will continue to be developed through an agile process to enable inputs from community stakeholders, including from multiple ongoing BRAIN programs focused on data and experimental standards, and multi-modal data ecosystem integration. As with the current BossDB system, we will continue to integrate community tools for data storage, access, and visualization, with a focus on new tool integration for data process- ing, annotation, and querying. Given the likelihood for more distributed data storage needs as data collections increase significantly in scale, we will also develop more robust data export and local-cloud hybrid syncing technologies. BossDB is a professionally-engineered community resource that has enabled many experiments in connectomics and neuroscience research, and the developments proposed herein will further enable more scientific impact by a broader range of users.