NeuroLex is a lexicon of neuroscience concepts supported by the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) project, which is in turn funded by the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research. It is only the lexical part of the NIF knowledge base, and NeuroLex is intended to make literature review easier and ensure consistent terminology and usage across researchers for the topics of experimental, clinical, and transnational neuroscience, and for genetic and genomic resources. It is structured as a semantic wiki, using Semantic MediaWiki.
NIF provides deeper access to a more focused set of resources that are relevant to neuroscience, search strategies tailored to the field, and access to content that is traditionally "hidden" from web search engines. The Framework is an inventory of neuroscience databases, annotated and integrated with a unified system of biomedical terminology (i.e., NeuroLex). NIF supports concept-based queries across multiple scales of biological structure and multiple levels of biological function, making it easier to search for and understand the results.
As part of the NIF, a search interface to many different sources of neuroscience information and data is provided. To make this search more effective, the NIF is constructing ontologies to help organize neuroscience concepts into category hierarchies, e.g. stating that a neuron is a cell. This allows users to perform more effective searches and to organize and understand the information that is returned. But an important adjunct to this activity is to clearly define all of the terms that are used to describe data.
Content
The initial entries in NeuroLex were built from the NIFSTD ontologies, which subsumed an earlier vocabulary, BIRNLex. It currently contains concepts that span gross anatomy, cells of the nervous system, subcellular structures, diseases, functions, and techniques. NIF is soliciting community input to add more content and correct what is there.
See also
NeuroNames
Neuroscience Information Framework
Notes and references
Further reading
NIF was featured in a special issue of Neuroinformatics, published in September 2008:
External links
NeuroLex site
Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) website
National Institutes of Health NIF website
Bioinformatics resources in NeuroLex
MediaWiki websites
Semantic wikis
Neuroscience software
Ontology (information science) Anatomical terminology Anatomy websites Biological databases