This article appears in the following Briefings in Bioinformatics issue: Special Issue: Challenges in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology [View the issue table of contents]
Approaches to neuroscience data integration
Corresponding author. Kei-Hoi Cheung, Yale Center for Medical Informatics, 300 George Street, Suite 501, New Haven, CT 06511, USA. Tel: 1-203-737-5783; Fax: 1-203-737-5708; E-mail: kei.cheung{at}yale.edu
As the number of neuroscience databases increases, the need for neuroscience data integration grows. This paper reviews and compares several approaches, including the Neuroscience Database Gateway (NDG), Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) and Entrez Neuron, which enable neuroscience database annotation and integration. These approaches cover a range of activities spanning from registry, discovery and integration of a wide variety of neuroscience data sources. They also provide different user interfaces for browsing, querying and displaying query results. In Entrez Neuron, for example, four different facets or tree views (neuron, neuronal property, gene and drug) are used to hierarchically organize concepts that can be used for querying a collection of ontologies. The facets are also used to define the structure of the query results.
Keywords: data integration, neuroinformatics, ontology, semantic web, user interface
Submitted: February 23, 2009. Received (in revised form): May 8, 2009.