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Electronic laboratory notebook platform to capture metadata describing the experimental setup and context of neuroimaging experiments
Praveen Sripad, Adeel Ansari, Alexander Barton, Tanya Brown, James Dickson, Aaryan Goyal, Blake Griggs, Sean Hill, Daniel Marcus, Mohana Ramaratnam, David Rotenberg, Niccolò Bonacchi*, Lucia Melloni*
Presenting author:
Praveen Sripad
The emerging popularity of Open Science has led to more and more data being publicly shared across the community. Openly shared data requires rich metadata in order to ensure usability and reproducibility. Further, with larger numbers of smaller datasets being shared it becomes critical to be able to combine these datasets in order to use them in a meaningful way. This requires a structured approach to describe experimental setup and context.

Our goal is to provide an open electronic laboratory notebook platform that enables the description, capture, and search of metadata related to neuroimaging experiments. The platform consists of three components: metadata description, metadata capture and metadata discovery. The description component consists of a structured metadata specification based on controlled terminology that describes the experimental context (e.g. project, lab), the laboratory setup (devices used), and the paradigm (stimuli used, responses etc.). The capture component is a user friendly interface for users to provide metadata into the platform. This is integrated into the XNAT data management tool. Lastly, the data search component will provide semantically-enabled queries across the metadata via the Blue Brain NEXUS platform.

With this platform we aim to provide the community with a toolset that will empower researchers to describe their experiments in a machine readable manner, share datasets with rich semantically-enabled metadata and perform in-depth searches across shared datasets.