This page provides an overview of solutions for electrophysiological data storage and recall. We should strive to store neuroscience data comforming to FAIR principles. Ideally, researchers can easily find and access the data acquired by others. Many laboratories and vendors have their own data formats. There are a number of well-document data storage solutions that try to transcend border of single labs. A non-extensive list:
- Neurodata without borders (NWB) is designed to store a variety of neurophysiology data, including data from intracellular and extracellular electrophysiology experiments, data from optical physiology experiments, and tracking and stimulus data. NWB has a broad user base, including the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Support for Python and Matlab.
- Neuroscience Data Interface (NDI) is a platform-independent standard that allows an analyst to use and create software that functions independently from the format of the raw data or the manner in which the data are organized into files. Supports Matlab. Python support is being implemented (2023-01-23).
- sigTOOL provides a user-extendable signal analysis environment in Matlab for processing electrophysiological data. Neuron spike-train, + spectral and time-domain analyses are built in. It allows a range of proprietary neuroscience data file formats to be loaded.
- neo is a Python package for representing electrophysiology data, together with support for reading a range of proprietary neurophysiology file formats, and support for writing to a subset of these formats plus non-proprietary formats including HDF5.
The approaches to make data easily accessible is differ among. NWB, for example, specifies how to store data and provides functions to access the data stored in this way. NDI specifies the interface that function accessing data conform to. The data format can be vendor and lab specific, but functions accessing the data are required to follow a specific format. sigTOOL and neo provide Matlab or Python functions to access vendor-specific data.
If you know of another good solution, please add to the page or email the site hosts.