The Experimental Directory Structure (Exdir), is an open specification for data storage in experimental pipelines which amends drawbacks associated with HDF5 while retaining its advantages. The project was recently published in Frontiers in Neuroinformatics: An Alternative to HDF5 Without Introducing a New File Format)
Expipe addresses another challenge in the re-use of data. This can be illustrated by a well known example where a student or researcher leaves the lab and the data cannot be found, understood or used by other people within or outside the lab due to the lack of metadata. In order to overcome this problem, Expipe has been developed for combining acquired data with metadata into a database. Expipe can be found here.
The award money shall be used to hire a skilled person to help develop the systems which will improve the way data is collected, stored, analysed and shared within the DigiBrain Project and other associated projects. Moreover, until recently neuroscience data was seldom shared in an open and accessible way to the community. It is intended that Exdir and Expipe will contribute to change this in the field of neuroscience.