Distributed collaboration: the case for the enhancement of Brainspell’s interface

Amanpreet Badhwar (1, 2) , David Kennedy (3) , Jean Baptiste Poline (4) , Roberto Toro (5)

1 UdeM - Université de Montréal
2 CRIUGM - Centre de recherche de l'Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montreal
3 UMASS - University of Massachusetts Medical School [Worcester]
4 LBNL - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory [Berkeley]
5 GHFC (UMR_3571 / U-Pasteur_1) - Génétique humaine et fonctions cognitives - Human Genetics and Cognitive Functions

The past several decades have seen an explosive growth in the number of published neuroimaging studies. In concert, the demand for freely available and openly accessible ‘study data’, that would facilitate future reanalysis, meta-analysis, hypothesis testing and repurpos-ing has also soared. Here we report on developments made to Brainspell[1] one of several web-based initiatives (e.g. BrainMap[2], NeuroVault[3], Neurosynth[4]) that allow individuals to search through and organize massive numbers of neuroimaging studies and results in meaningful ways. Distinct from other databases, Brainspell [http://brainspell.org] is the first web-based initiative to allow users to manually annotate and curate machine-parsed data, as well as manually extend the database via its crowdsourcing user interface. The goal of our Brainhack project was to improve Brainspell’s interface. We worked to (a) provide supplementary manual data edit options (b) facilitate efficient manual database extension, and (c) aid meaningful organization of data.

Domains: Life Sciences [q-bio]

Amanpreet Badhwar, David Kennedy, Jean Baptiste Poline, Roberto Toro. Distributed collaboration: the case for the enhancement of Brainspell’s interface. GigaScience, 2016, 5 (1), pp.s13742-016-0147-0-a. ⟨10.1186/s13742-016-0147-0-a⟩. ⟨pasteur-01967221⟩