We are finally catching our breath back here in San Diego after a very exciting release of the Whole Brain Catalog™ at SfN. Our booth was cornered away in “neuroinformatics row” next to the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) and the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF). The enthusiastic response we got from the neuroscience community is very exciting and we want to maintain the energy!

We have been following up with visitors to our booth and exploring potential new avenues to engage the brain research community. If you haven’t had the chance to download the tool, make sure to visit our website (http://www.wholebraincatalog.org) and click that big orange button to be directed to the wiki. The wiki page has directions on how to launch the java webstart, which should only take a couple minutes on most computers. Some users have had some issues with their videocards, so if you have any issues you should visit our Google groups’ page. This is where we plan to start conversations among the Whole Brain Catalog™ community and where users can get help with any problems they encounter.

The Whole Brain Catalog is in beta and, as such, a work in progress.  We are working to make it easier to upload your data into the environment and looking to the community to help guide our next steps forward. We are interested in learning more about the analysis tools that you use for your research as well as getting the developer community excited about integrating their tools into the environment.

Our tool highly benefits from building on the framework of Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) and the Cell Centered Database (CCDB). The NIF provides a semantic framework or common vocabulary as well as access to a wide range of neuroscience resources including databases, images, and grant information related to neuroscience research areas. NIF has been holding a biweekly webinar (Tomorrow will be one featuring the Cell Ontology) related to neuroscience projects. The CCDB hosts the data that you can view in the Whole Brain Catalog™; it is a web accessible database for high resolution 2D, 3D and 4D data from light and electron microscopy, including correlated imaging.

We look forward to your thoughts about our activities and the tool. So comment on this post, find us on twitter and on facebook, or come join us in our forums!

In the meantime, here are some other helpful links:

User Documentation: http://wiki.wholebraincatalog.org/wiki/User_Documentation_Home

Developer Documentation: http://wiki.wholebraincatalog.org/wiki/Developer_Documentation_Home

Google Groups to ask questions: http://groups.google.com/group/wholebraincatalog?hl=en

Developer Forum: http://wholebrain.forumsplace.com/index.php?sid=4af6efc05efed0937abdf6793cf249f6

Tags: download, INCF, links, NIF, SFN, whole brain catalog

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