SHAREbrain: standardisation workflow

SHAREbrain is a workflow aimed to help researchers prepare data and metadata in a standardised manner for sharing via the EBRAINS Data & Knowledge service. Full documentation of SHAREbrain can be found on GitHub.

About the SHAREbrain standardisation workflow

Advanced instruments and specialised technologies are increasingly used to acquire complex experimental data describing functional properties of the brain. While the FAIR principles are widely adopted, reuse of shared data is limited and apparently hampered by methodological complexity and lack of standardisation. A key challenge is that researchers employing sophisticated methods have their own modus operandi and data management systems tailored to their experimental protocols, while adaptation of community standards requires knowledge and additional effort.

This lack of standardisation makes it difficult to utilise open access functional brain data in automated analyses driven by machine-learning.

The SHAREbrain workflow builds on the NANSEN (Neuro ANalysis Software ENsemble), a MATLAB based toolbox providing a user-friendly graphical user interface and features custom (laboratory-specific) file-adaptors with automated data converters for creating data organised according to the Neurodata Without Borders (NWB) standard and extracting in-depth openMINDS metadata suitable for sharing and reuse via the EBRAINS research infrastructure.