Dates and Location
- Dates: May 12-15, 2020
- Location: Virtual (due to COVID-19)
Objective
The Neurodata Without Borders: Neurophysiology project (NWB, https://www.nwb.org/) is an effort to standardize the description and storage of neurophysiology data and metadata. NWB enables data sharing and reuse and reduces the energy-barrier to applying data analytics both within and across labs. Several laboratories, including the Allen Institute for Brain Science, have wholeheartedly adopted NWB. The community needs to join forces to achieve data standardization in neurophysiology.
The purpose of the NWB User Days training workshop was to bring the experimental neurophysiology community together to further adoption and the development of NWB, the NWB software libraries, and the progress of the scientific workflows that rely on NWB. Members of the community exchanged ideas and best practices for using NWB and the libraries, shared NWB-based tools, surfaced common needs, solved bugs, made feature requests, brainstormed about future funding and collaboration, and made progress on current blockages. The event also enabled NWB developers and users to interact with each other to facilitate communication, gather requirements, and train users.
In contrast to conferences, where the primary focus is to report results, the objective of the Hackathon was to provide a venue for NWB users and tool developers to learn about NWB and collaboratively work on any NWB-related research projects. This event was meant to foster community and collaboration around NWB, not competition. Participants were expected to bring data from their lab, software they would like to integrate with NWB, and/or collaborate with others to build integration with NWB.
How to prepare?
- Create a project page with an outline for your workshop project.
- Have example datasets that you need for your workshop project ready. For any lab-specific data (i.e., data not in NWB) you should know how to read the data using Python or MATLAB and ideally have scripts ready for reading the data.
- Install the Python or MATLAB software for NWB:
- PyNWB (Python): https://pynwb.readthedocs.io/en/stable/getting_started.html
- MatNWB (MATLAB): https://neurodatawithoutborders.github.io/matnwb/
- For an overview of NWB, see also: https://www.nwb.org/
Additional Organizational Support
- The Kavli Foundation