The NeuroCommons Project
Here you'll find technical information on the NeuroCommons project. For general and non-technical information on the project please consult:
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What is it? The NeuroCommons project seeks to make all scientific research materials - research articles, knowledge bases, research data, physical materials - as available and as usable as they can be. We do this by fostering practices that render information in a form that promotes uniform access by computational agents - sometimes called "interoperability". We want knowledge sources to combine easily and meaningfully, enabling semantically precise queries that span multiple information sources. Our work covers general data and knowledge sources used in computational biology as well as sources specific to neuroscience and neuromedicine. The practices that we develop and promote are designed to play well on the Semantic Web. We view our technical work not as creating a new service or content library, although we do both, but rather as helping to promote semantically linked scientific information and of generic practices that lead to such a "commons".
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Architecture
We provide an distribution of a variety of RDF resources, including conversions of GO, GO annotations, Senselab, and a selection of databases from NCBI. These may be loaded into your own triple store, or used in any other way. Triple store We have a triple store that holds the contents of the RDF distribution, with access via SPARQL query at our SPARQL form (or endpoint). Although we make an effort to keep the store stable and available, it should be considered a prototype and subject to major revision from time to time. Please consult us if you would like to build applications that depend on it. |
Talk with us We have a Google discussion group for use by those who are using either the RDF or our hosted triple store. Grow the distribution We encourage independent efforts to apply good RDF and Semantic Web practice and will help such efforts to coordinate with the NeuroCommons project. Projects may choose to contribute to our growing RDF distribution and the body of source code that generates it. Some of our thoughts on good practice are given here and elsewhere in this site. Report bugs Visit our issue tracker to report problems and track their resolution. Contribute to the software effort Our subversion repository is open for perusal. Most of the code is related to conversion to RDF. Send mail to Jonathan Rees or Alan Ruttenberg if you would like write access. Go here: Enlisting support brainstorming if you have ideas about how to broaden participation. Learn more Our reading room collects links to background reading materials. |
