Brain data on the Internet

In an effort to help neuroscientists quickly find the latest information about the brain, the National Institutes of Health has established a consortium to design a Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF). The consortium includes scientists at Yale, the California Institute of Technology, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, George Mason University and the University of California at San Diego.

The NIF will help guide scientists to resources on the Internet by identifying software tools and data, developing language to describe the resources and placing them in a Web-accessible database. “To use this information effectively, neuroscientists need to be able to locate the latest research results that are relevant to the particular behavior they are studying or neurological disease they are treating,” said Gordon M. Shepherd, M.D., Ph.D., professor of neuroscience and neurobiology and a member of the Yale team.