Hello everyone,

The next NIF Webinar is scheduled for Tuesday January 11, 2011. Please join our own Dr. Anita Bandrowski as we explore DRG – the Drug Related Gene Database. Funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), the DRG database was created to facilitate discovery and use of resources relevant to drug abuse research. The database’s focus is on gene expression data and exposes data from investigations using DNA microarrays, immunohistochemistry, and in-situ hybridizations. Below is information on how to join the online meeting and accompanying teleconference.

Date and Time: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 • 11:00-12:00 PST
Topic: DRG – the Drug Related Gene Database
Presenter: Dr. Anita Bandrowski
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll-free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

Mark your calendars! See you there.

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 next week, December 7th, 2010. Please join Ruchi Parekh, the NeuroMorpho.Org Project Lead, as she introduces the latest version released on November 5, 2010. She will be discussing what’s new, what datasets have been added, and how researchers alike can take advantage of this tool (sharing their data, fostering data mining, analysis, and modeling, and ultimately preventing data loss). Below is information on how to join the online meeting and accompanying teleconference.

Date and Time: Tuesday, December 7, 2010 • 11:00-12:00 PST
Topic: NeuroMorpho.Org
Presenters: Ruchi Parekh
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll-free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

NeuroMorpho.Org is a web-based inventory dedicated to densely archive and organize all publicly shared digital reconstructions of neuronal morphology. Since its creation in 2006, 3D reconstructions from this website have been used for comparative morphological and stereological analysis, compartmental simulations of neuronal electrophysiology, computational models of structure and development, scientific education, and anatomically realistic neural networks. Now four years later, the latest version is to be released presenting the new look of NeuroMorpho.Org. This release introduces multiple new functionalities aimed at improving navigation through the database.  NeuroMorpho.Org have also added 122 new digital reconstructions bringing the total number of digital reconstructions in the database to 5793, reflecting contributions from 47 laboratories world-wide.

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 next week, November 23rd, 2010. Please join Mike Hawrylycz from the Allen Institute for Brain Science and Ilya Zaslavsky from the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD, both experts on digital atlasing, as they present the brain atlas interoperability effort led by the International Neuroinformatics Coordination Facility (INCF). The INCF Digital Brain Atlasing Program coordinates development and integration of atlasing projects across INCF member countries. Among its major accomplishments are development of Waxholm Space (WHS), a coordinate-based reference space for registration of neuroanatomical data in the mouse brain, and atlas services and Waxholm Markup Language, which provide a standard way of exchanging and transforming spatial information across several atlases and coordinate systems, including WHS, Allen Brain Atlas, Paxinos Atlas, and Edinburgh Mouse Atlas.

Date and Time: Tuesday, November 23, 2010 • 11:00-12:00 PST
Topic: Integrating Digital Atlases of Rodent Brain: the INCF Waxholm Space and Atlas Service
Presenters: Mike Hawrylycz and Ilya Zaslavsky
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll-free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

There will be a discussion period involving the Shared Names Project and the NCBO BioPortal.

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 March 30th, 2010. Please join Dr. Amarnath Gupta  from the University of California, San Diego as he covers: NIF as a Multi-Model Semantic Information System–Part 1: Relational, XML, RDF and OWL models.  Below is information on how to join the online meeting and accompanying teleconference.

Date and Time: Tuesday, March 30, 2010 • 11:00-12:00 PST
Topic: NIF as a Multi-Model Semantic Information System–Part 1: Relational, XML, RDF and OWL models
Presenters: Amarnath Gupta
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll-free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

An important goal of the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) is to develop a data infrastructure that can ingest structured, semi-structured and unstructured information and perform semantic search over them. This is the first presentation of a series that will cover the NIF data infrastructure. In this presentation. we lay out the foundation of the different forms of data models that NIF is equipped to handle at this point. We specifically describe the relational, object relational, XML, RDF and OWL models of data and knowledge, and touch upon some of their variants. For these models, we present a simplified overview of their semantics, capabilities, and limitations. We conclude the presentation with an outlook of the specialized data models that NIF expects to handle in the future.

We hope you can make it!

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 February 9th, 2010. Please join Dr. Maryann Martone, Principal Investigator of the NIF Project, and Fahim Imam, Ontology Engineer from UC San Diego,  for an informative session on the NIF Standard Ontology. Details follow.

Date and Time: Tuesday, February 9, 2010 • 11:00-12:00 PST
Topic: Defined versus Asserted Classes:  Working with the NIF OWL Ontologies
Presenters: Dr. Maryann Martone and Fahim Imam
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll-free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

The NIF project has established a set of modular ontologies covering many of the major domains of relevance to neuroscience, the NIF Standard Ontology (NIFSTD).  This Webinar will focus on NIF’s approach to the asserted vs inferred hierarchy in the NIFSTD ontology and how NIF builds up more complicated relationships among NIF modules while keeping modularity intact.  When it comes to asserted hierarchy of classes, NIFSTD ontologies took the single inheritance principle which is also an important OBO foundry recommendation.  This principle allows us to have the classes that are univocal and unambiguous within the core NIFSTD modules. We believe that this principle is often misunderstood to mean that you can only have a single hierarchy in your ontology.  However, through the use of logical definitions with necessary and sufficient conditions, multiple parents can be inferred using automated reasoning.  This saves a great deal of manual labor and provides a logical reason as to how that class may exist in different hierarchies.  In this Webinar, we will provide examples including the NIF’s inferred hierarchy of neurons by neurotransmitter and by soma location.

We look forward to seeing you there.