Neural Activity Resource (NAR) Calcium Imaging Ontology (NARCI)

The need for semantic description of data sets as a metadata, specially those originating from neuroscience experiments are well established due to diversity of experimental procedures and modalities. NARCI, Neural Activity Resource (NAR) Calcium Imaging Ontology, provides a semantic graph schema for describing Calcium Imaging experiments based on the work Montijn et al., 2016, Cell Reports 16, 2486–2498 doi.

This is an RDF schema using OWL languge and should be used to expressmetadata from a calcium imaging experiment.

Programmatic Usage

For short tutorial on how to use the ontology programmatically via rdflib see python notebook under tutorial.

narci release management

The versions of the persistent URL of the ontology, narci should be used in production. Note that once it is released, schema version move to dev of next release number, first minor in the repository, for development purpose. The schema persistent URLs versioning should match with the released version. Documentation and tutorial for each version can be found in the released versions, tagged versions or in released files, these should be linked in the below list of production URLs.

Ontology current development URL

http://www.purl.org/narci/v0.3dev/schema

Ontology in production URLs

http://www.purl.org/narci/v0.2.1/schema
tutorial | full graph | prov graph

Release procedure

Continue using dev version (URL) pointing to master branch.
Once it is released, if not yet updated, update tutorials README.md with the new version and create a persistent URL with the correct version pointing to corresponding tag, release version.
Remove previous dev version persistent URL to avoid unreachble links. There should be only single development persistent URL at a time.

How to cite

Neural Activity Resource Calcium Imaging Ontology, M.Suezen, G.Meijer, X.Troncoso, J.S.Montijn, C.S.Lansink, A.P.Davison, M.Denker, T.Wachtler, S.Gruen, C.M.A.Pennartz (2017) http://www.purl.org/narci/v0.2.1/schema

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Generic License.

(c) 2017 University of Amsterdam
         Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH
         The German Neuroinformatics Node (G-Node)
         Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CRNS)

Mailing list

There is a group/mailing list for narci called narci:Calcium Imaging Ontology, Group: narci-ontology.

References

Population-Level Neural Codes Are Robust to Single-Neuron Variability from a Multidimensional Coding Perspective Montijn et al., 2016, Cell Reports 16, 2486–2498 doi.

Acknowledgements

narci is developed under the auspices of European Union (EU) Human Brain Project (HBP). Work package SP 5.7.2 named NAR within the Neuroinformatics Platform.

HumanBrainProject/narci