Neuroinformatics Special Issue Highlights Neuroscience Information Framework
The latest issue of Neuroinformatics describes the new Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF), an inventory of web-based neurosciences data, resources and tools for scientists and students: http://nif.nih.gov.
An initiative of the National Institutes of Health Blueprint for Neuroscience Research, the NIF seeks to advance neuroscience research by enabling discovery and access to public research data and tools worldwide through an open source, networked environment. It enables users to discover global neuroscience web resources that cut across traditional boundaries – from experimental, clinical and translational neuroscience databases to knowledge bases, atlases, and genetic and genomic resources.
The NIF provides deeper access to a more focused set of resources that are relevant to neuroscience, search strategies tailored to neuroscience, and access to content that is traditionally ‘hidden’ from web search engines. All components of the NIF are available Open Source to encourage multiple community, institution and publisher development of NIF-compatible portals and web resources.
The entire special issue of the journal is freely available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/120559. An introductory White Paper summarizes the project and its development in the context of the present and future of neuroinformatics, as well as the challenges of serving the entire neuroscience community.