DATA SHARING FOR COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE

NSF is exploring possible approaches to support data sharing and corpora development for the computational neuroscience and related communities. Comments are invited on this general topic, and on the specific questions outlined below.

If you have data, algorithms, stimuli, or other resources to share; if you would make use of such resources; or if you have other general comments, questions, or experience to share, please contact Ken Whang, Program Director in the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems.

The following questions outline several specific issues of interest to NSF. Please feel to comment on any or all of the issues below:

If you have data or other resources that you would share:

1. Briefly describe data, algorithms, stimuli, or other resources that you would be interested in sharing (or are already sharing).
   
   
2. Describe its utility to the computational neuroscience community. In addition to the data at the core of your own research, consider data that might be useful to others that you make limited use of yourself. Consider both research and educational uses, and utility over short and long terms.
   
   
3. Under what circumstances would you be willing to share it? What kind of support (time, money, or otherwise) would you need to make it usable and available to others? How would you want your contribution to be credited? Would you want to place restrictions on its use?

If there are resources that you would like to use:

4. What kinds of data, algorithms, stimuli, or other resources would be most useful to you for your work? What would they enable you to do?
   
   
5. Are there particular data formats, metadata, or other characteristics that would significantly increase the usability of these resources?
   
   
6. Are there data sets or other resources that currently do not exist, that need to be developed as shared resources for the community? Briefly describe.

If you have experience with shared resources:

7. If you have already developed widely shared resources, please comment on factors that made those resources or their deployment more or less effective. Approximately how many people used them? How did they find out about them? How did they provide feedback on their quality or utility?
   
   
8. If you have used shared resources in neuroscience (e.g., http://ndg.sfn.org/) or other fields (e.g., Linguistic Data Consortium, Machine Learning Repository, etc.), please comment on their utility and their appropriateness as models for the computational neuroscience community.

General suggestions and comments:

References or websites:

Your comments on this topic are greatly appreciated by NSF.

Please be aware that your comments are not confidential. All comments received, including sender identities, could be made available to the public.

For further information, please contact:

Ken Whang
Program Director
Division of Information and Intelligent Systems
National Science Foundation
kwhang@nsf.gov
(703)292-5149