OPERATION, SUPPORT AND STRATEGIC ENHANCEMENT OF THE NEUROSCIENCE INFORMATION FRAMEWORK

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 DESCRIPTION: The Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF; http://neuinfo.org) is currently managed, maintained, and hosted by researchers in the Center for Research in Biological Systems (CRBS) at the University of California, San Diego. Our group is the principal developer of the NIF system and has overseen its growth since 2008 from a modest catalog of 300 resources developed during the first phase of NIF, to the largest source of neuroscience resources on the web. As defined here, resources include data, databases, software/web-based tools, materials, literature, networks, terminologies, or information that would accelerate the pace of neuroscience research and discovery. NIF was instantiated because many of these valuable tools and services were largely unknown to the scientific community they were meant to serve. With the launch of major brain initiatives in the US and Europe, the amount of neuroscience data and tools will continue to increase. NIF can be viewed as a cost effective "PubMed" and "PubMed Central" for digital assets, e.g., databases, software tools, alternative media, to make them collectively searchable and present a unified discovery environment for biomedical researchers. The NIF is heavily used, as measured by the number of visitors per month (more than 40,000) to the NIF web resources and the large number of repeat users (~35%) that visit the NIF discovery portal on a regular basis. NIF's services, standards and products are also heavily used as our web services are now regularly receiving more than 15 million hits per month. NIF has developed a novel sustainability plan that provides for continued enhancement and population of the resource. NIF has developed a reputation as a trusted community partner, allowing us to gain cooperation with large segments of the neuroscience community, as well as publishers, non-profit and government organizations. Through these networks, we've been able to launch major initiatives, help launch new collaborative efforts in basic and clinical neuroscience, and implement standards to help transform the way that we cite and track research resources. The work to be performed during the award period will be directed towards operating and maintaining the current NIF system while providing necessary strategic enhancements and providing broad outreach and dissemination efforts to encourage utilization of the NIF. A core new area of development will be centered around providing analytic tools to explore and identify lacunas of knowledge in Neuroscience. The initial work will focus on developing analytic heatmaps for activation foci from the neuroimaging literature.