More on NeuroCommons

M.L. Baker, New Brain Trust to Work Like the Web, CIO Insight, December 12, 2005. Excerpt:

Researchers poring over brain scans may soon have an easier time integrating that data with information about the genes and proteins that make brain cells tick. A software vendor and a nonprofit group are teaming up to create NeuroCommons.org, a free, shared repository of data and other tools to speed research on brain function and disease. Informatics company Teranode will provide an infrastructure and means to store disparate data in common formats. Science Commons, a project of the nonprofit corporation Creative Commons, will develop a community of users and experts, plus work to help create an intuitive interface to find and analyze content....There's a real need for a shared platform in neurology, said John Wilbanks, executive director of Science Commons. Separate research foundations exist to fund different rare diseases, but they cannot share information without running afoul of technical and legal complications. One hope is that researchers can gather preliminary evidence for their hypotheses using other researchers' datasets. NeuroCommons.org should also allow researchers to readily compare proposed mechanisms about what, how, and when various genes and proteins interact. Neurologists would use an interface much like a Web search engine, but instead of finding relevant Web sites, they would be able to find other researchers' datasets and protocols, as well as working models of how genes, proteins and brain regions interact. Even better, NeuroCommons.org could automate such tasks and analyze the results. Researchers would not need to spend days doing literature searches or hunting with several available databases for useful data, said Matthew Shanahan, CMO for Teranode. That's especially important as the number of proteins and genes associated with diseases swells. "The thought that a scientist can do that manually efficiently doesn't make sense; you really need the aid of software now."...Neurocommons.org is set up to be maintained by its community of users. Researchers will be able to annotate each others' data. Wilbanks hopes that, eventually, researchers will see contributing information to the semantic Web as part of their scientific duty, much like peer review. But he admits that it isn't yet part of scientific culture. "It's hard to get someone to take the time to say, 'I'm going to make my data reusable by someone that doesn't know me.' "

Also see Paul Krill, Semantic Web eyed for life sciences data, InfoWorld, December 9, 2005. Excerpt:

The Semantic Web involves a concept in which data from multiple sources and ontologies can be integrated into a single information space. Experiment design automation (XDA) software vendor Teranode, which focuses on software for life sciences, plans to collaborate with Science Commons to build a neurology repository for the Semantic Web. Called Neurocommons.org, the project will provide a free repository of neurology-related data, tools and pathway knowledge for use by public and private researchers. Science Commons is an effort launched to promote the free flow of scientific information. Teranode believes life sciences represents an ideal test case for the Semantic Web because life sciences data comes from a variety of sources, including brain images, robot-arrayed gene chips, machines sorting materials cell-by-cell and gene sequencers. Science Commons will use the Teranode XDA infrastructure for Neurocommons.org. All content will be available in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) format, allowing for participating foundations to use a shared repository of research.