Overview of standards in neuroscience

In biology, several community standards have been developed to describe experimental data (e.g. Brain Imaging Data Structure BIDS, Neurodata Without Borders NWB and computational models (e.g. Systems Biology Markup Language SBML, CellML, Scalable Open Network Architecture TemplAte SONATA, PyNN, and Neural Open Markup Language (NeuroML). These standards have enabled open and interoperable ecosystems of software applications, libraries, and databases to emerge, facilitating the sharing of research outputs, an endeavour encouraged by a growing number of funding agencies and scientific journals.

NeuroML as a standard

NeuroML is an international, collaborative initiative to develop a language for describing detailed models of neural systems, which will serve as a standard data format for defining and exchanging descriptions of neuronal cell and network models.

Endorsed INCF standard

The mission of INCF is to promote the uptake of FAIR data management practices in neuroscience through the development of standards and best practices that support open, FAIR, and citable neuroscience. INCF also provides training on how standards and best practices facilitate reproducibility and enable the sharing of data and code.

NeuroML is an INCF endorsed standard.

COMBINE standard

The “COmputational Modeling in BIology NEtwork” (COMBINE) is an initiative to coordinate the development of the various community standards and formats for computational models. By doing so, it is expected that the federated projects will develop a set of interoperable and non-overlapping standards covering all aspects of modelling in biology. The global COMBINE effort is led by the COMBINE Coordination Board.

Building on the experience of mature projects, which already have stable specifications, software support, user-base and community governance, COMBINE will help foster or support fledgling efforts aimed at filling gaps or new needs. As those efforts mature, they may become part of the core set of COMBINE standards.

One of the initial activities of COMBINE is to coordinate the organization of scientific and technical events common to several standards. Those events, as others related to our field of research are gathered in a calendar.

NeuroML is a COMBINE official standard.