EEG/ERP Portal (EEGBase)
Summary
EEG/ERP Portal (EEGBase) is a web based portal for storage, annotation, management, analysis and sharing of electrophysiology data. It is intended to be used by researchers/companies who need to use/store/analyze these data well annotated and possibly publicly visible.
Advantages and innovations
The software portal as a web based application has the following advantages:
- already stored, annotated and publicly offered electrophysiology datasets under various licenses (non-commercial license – fee does not required, non-commercial license – fee required, commercial license – fee required)
- a flexible graphical user interface – the user can create /reuse customized metadata templates, standardized terminology is supported, new terminologies can be interactively created
- web and mobile graphical user interfaces
- support of outputs in semantic web languages and HDF5 format
- flexible no-sql database for metadata storage
- support for licensing policies for experimental data
- user roles and work in research groups
- full text search
- free registration
- experiments in RDF, OWL and odML formats
- robust open source technologies used for development
Description
As in other areas of experimental science, operation of electrophysiological laboratory, design and performance of electrophysiological experiments, collection, storage and sharing of experimental data and metadata, and their analysis and interpretation are time consuming activities. If these activities are well organized and supported by a suitable infrastructure, work efficiency of experimenters increases significantly. Currently, most of these data are stored simply in folders on hard drives, they are not properly annotated, and are incomprehensible very soon after their collection. These data thus cannot be also shared within community and offered to other interested parties under clear license conditions.
EEG/ERP Portal (EEGBase) enables community researchers to store, annotate, manage, process, share, download and search data and metadata from electrophysiological experiments. The internal data and metadata model progressively reflects the outcomes of current standardization efforts for sharing of electrophysiology data and the outcomes of the groups developing domain ontologies. The integrated Semantic Framework provides experimental metadata in the semantic web technologies and languages (RDF, OWL). The data/metadata can be also exported to an HDF5 container.
The data are managed through several user interfaces; web and mobile user interfaces for human readers, a semantic web interface for automatic reasoners, and web services for third party tools. The output of these services is provided in most used data formats. The mobile version of the portal is a supplementary tool used in environments where internet connectivity is not available. The data are then synchronized with EEGBase via web services.
The portal has been designed and developed using robust open source technologies and semantic web resources to ensure future extensibility of the application and sustainability of stored data/metadata. The graphical user interface is flexible, it allows users to create and reuse customized metadata templates to cover a larger number of laboratory needs in terms of the variety of stored data and metadata. Standardized terminology is supported as well as new terminologies can be interactively created. Currently, we focus on improving a graphical layout of the user interface.
Currently we offer already carefully collected, stored, and well annotated electrophysiology datasets under various licenses (non-commercial license – fee does not required, non-commercial license – fee required, commercial license – fee required). Experimental data are organized in packages containing datasets obtained by applying the same experimental protocol.
Another portal branch is being developed primarily for the use of people who want to store their own medical records and/or secondarily for doctors and medical personnel who need an efficient means for storing and basic diagnosing of medical data.
We are looking for partners
The software portal and offered data are intended to be used by research institutions, universities, individual researchers, and technologically innovative companies who need to store/use/analyze well organized, annotated, safely stored, and possibly publicly visible electrophysiology data under clear license conditions for their applications/research. The services are intended to be used by researchers who collect vast amounts of electrophysiological data but have no capacity to process them and/or by companies developing applications that collect and visualize bio-data which are required by costumers to be further interpreted.
