Practical Management of Heterogeneous Neuroimaging Metadata by Global Neuroimaging Data Repositories

Frontiers in Neuroinformatics

Arthur W Toga¹  Karen eCrawford¹  Scott eNeu¹ 

[1]UCLA School of Medicine

关键词: Data archive;    File format;    Image metadata;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fninf.2012.00008

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Rapidly evolving neuroimaging techniques are producing unprecedented quantities of digital data at the same time that many research studies are evolving into global, multi-disciplinary collaborations between geographically distributed scientists. While networked computers have made it almost trivial to transmit data across long distances, collecting and analyzing this data requires extensive metadata if the data is to be maximally shared.Though it is typically straightforward to encode text and numerical values into files and send content between different locations, it is often difficult to attach context and implicit assumptions to the content.As the number of and geographic separation between data contributors grows to national and global scales, the heterogeneity of the collected metadata increases and conformance to a single standardization becomes implausible.Neuroimaging data repositories must then not only accumulate data but must also consolidate disparate metadata into an integrated view.In this article, using specific examples from our experiences, we demonstrate how standardization alone cannot achieve full integration of neuroimaging data from multiple heterogeneous sources and why a fundamental change in the architecture of neuroimaging data repositories is needed instead.

【 授权许可】

Unknown