Blueprint and Blueprint Affiliated Informatics


 

Informatics

Blueprint Informatics Team (BIT)
The BIT has three overall objectives: 1) to accelerate the use of computational approaches in the neurosciences by advancing informatics research, 2) to increase the value of informatics research by encouraging communication, collaboration, and coordination among the Blueprint Institutes and Centers, and 3) to provide a collective neuroscience voice and unified leadership for informatics activities across the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and within the wider neuroscience research community. The BIT functions as a common platform for hosting discussions about the overarching area of informatics and serves as an integrating force across all informatics initiatives, whether they are Blueprint, Blueprint-affiliated, or otherwise.

Contact:Michael F. Huerta, Ph.D.
Associate Director
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Mhuert1@mail.nih.gov
(301) 443-1815

Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF)
NIF (www.neuinfo.org) is a publicly accessible online portal that helps researchers discover and share a variety of neuroscience resources such as data, materials and software.  Its search tools offer multiple ways to explore its rapidly growing content, which currently includes a customized neuroscience-relevant web index of approximately one-half million pages, a curated registry of more than 2000 neuroscience-relevant resources, and an expanding inventory of federated data sources.  The NIF data federation enables users to query multiple databases simultaneously and display the results within the NIF interface, categorized by resource type (such as a grants database, an image database or an atlas) and biological scale (such as gene expression or brain activity patterns).

Like other search interfaces, NIF allows simple keyword searches, but it also enables concept-based queries.  Through its advanced search features, users can elect to explore related terms and synonyms.  For example, if a user enters the word “neurodegenerative,” NIF can identify a range of neurodegenerative disorders and related terms to help narrow the search. These advanced capabilities are made possible by NIF’s Neurolex (http://neurolex.org/wiki/), a wiki-based system for defining and categorizing commonly used neuroscience terms and concepts.  Neuroscientists using terminologies not currently represented in NIF are encouraged to work with NIF to make their vocabularies available through Neurolex.  Resource providers also are encouraged to read the NIF blog (http://blog.neuinfo.org/) for best practices to facilitate resource discovery and federation.  Investigators at the University of California, San Diego are leading the current phase of NIF development, and regularly adding new features to NIF with input from the research community.  Participation in the NIF community and news about NIF are available via Twitter, NIF webinars, the NIF mailing list, the NIF blog and popular social news and bookmarking sites. Information for easily adding NIF search boxes to the Firefox search bar and to web pages is available on the NIF portal.

Contacts: Karen Skinner, Ph.D.
Deputy Director for Science and Technology Development
Division of Basic Neuroscience and Behavior Research
National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)
kskinner@nida.nih.gov
(301) 435-0886

David Shurtleff, Ph.D.
Director, Division of Basic Neuroscience and Behavioral Research
National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)
dshurtle@mail.nih.gov
(301) 443-1887

Blueprint-Affiliated Informatics
Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN)

The goal of the BIRN is to develop an infrastructure that allows researchers to share data and research tools, and to collaborate through a virtual environment.  The BIRN Coordinating Center is led by the University of Southern California, with the participation of investigators from the University of Chicago, University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, Irvine and Massachusetts General Hospital.  A new BIRN Community Service (U24) grant will be funded to ensure that the data-sharing infrastructure is responsive to the needs of broad biomedical research community.   Funds also have been provided for researchers to bring their data and data analysis tools into the BIRN infrastructure, and for creating controlled vocabularies to match the meaning of terms across different data sets.  The data and tools developed through BIRN are freely available at www.nbirn.net.

Contact: Liming Yang, Ph.D.
Health Scientist Administrator, Division of Biomedical Technology
National for Research Resources (NCRR)
lyang@mail.nih.gov
(301) 435-0755

Blueprint Informatics Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOAs)
Developed under the BIT to take advantage of the BIRN infrastructure already in place are two active, Blueprint-affiliated FOAs:

Sharing Data and Tools(PAR-07-426 grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PAR-07-426.html)asks researchers to apply for funds to bring either their data analysis tools or their data into the BIRN infrastructure for use by the research community. The BIRN infrastructure is unique in that it allows multiple data analysis tools to be compared against each other in a common environment using real data. The infrastructure also provides a convenient way for researchers to store and share their data.

Data Ontologies for Biomedical Research(PAR-07-425 grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PAR-07-425.html)tackles a deeper problem of research data sharing – how to match the meanings of words when their usage varies among data sets. This grant will support research to create an ontology using controlled vocabularies for two datasets in a specific research area. Once the ontology is created, it will be shared within the field.

Contacts from individual Institutes and Centers are listed in each FOA.

NIH Blueprint and Blueprint-affiliated Informatics activities are funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Institutes and Centers that comprise the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research.