NIF Version 2.1 has been released. This minor release includes the following improvements:

• Resolved issues of multiple scroll bars by using a new layout scheme for the results page
• Fixed the bug relating to mammals and primates in the selection of species from the gene preference section
• Removed thumbnail images from GENSAT to improve consistency
• Improved the handling of dots and slashes in indexes
• Implemented a grid view in the databases tab now to automatically resize and fill in the empty space with data
• Enabled the database tab to now show data from the first database in the list of results instead of a blank screen
• Changed the layout of two “clear” buttons, no longer placed next to each other to avoid confusion
• Fixed the paging issue with literature results

You informed us of the bugs. We fixed them.

• “When I right click on a Neurolex term in the expand box, it gives me the “show in NCBI” option but  link doesn’t work”
• “On the NIF Literature’s tab, the  ‘More information’ link along the top is broken”
• “Genes get duplicate synonyms”
• “Genes should not allow expansion (Genes should not have a folder or allow expansion in the term tree)”
• “Boolean conditions are getting mixed up in the Gene Query”
• “For some queries e.g. Hippocampus the web results show the first page as blank although there is data on that page. The web result is blank, but moved to page 2 and page 2 displays results”
• “Database results ’sort’ function not working (aside from the capitalization, numerical value issues)

Feel free to take a look at the NIF Version 2.1 Release Notes. NIF continues to improve to better fit your neuroscience needs. Visit NIF now and tell us what you think!

The Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) hosts Webinar series on topics focused on collaborating with NIF, getting involved in building the NIF vocabulary, using NIF portal resources, as well as other appropriate NIF topics.

Our next NIF Webinar is scheduled for January 19th, 2010. Please join Dr. Trish Whetzel from the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research (BMIR) for an informative session about the Annotator Tool done by the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO). Details follow.

Date and Time: Tuesday, January 19, 2010 • 11:00-12:00 PST
Topic: NCBO Annotator
Presenters: Dr. Trish Whetzel
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll-free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

This Webinar will provide a demonstration of the NCBO Annotator, an ontology-based Web service used for annotation of textual metadata from public datasets with biomedical ontology concepts, thus facilitating data integration and translational discoveries. Through annotation or tagging of datasets with ontology concepts, unstructured free-text data becomes structured and standardized. Despite these benefits, wide-scale semantic annotation is not common due to the need for trained curators and lack of an ontology repository. We will go through the NCBO Annotator web service workflow and show how it provides an alternative to manual annotation through use of a fast and accurate concept recognition tool and access to almost two hundred ontologies from BioPortal and UMLS.

We really hope you can make it.

Thanks!