PPCS
The overarching goal of this proposal is to design a prototype
distributed neuroscience electronic information system capable of
supporting all technical and scientific information produced by a small to
medium intellectual community and also capable of providing constant access
of this data to all member laboratories via Internet. Production of such a
system involves the generation of new information and technology in
information, computer science and neuroscience. Further, the participants
in the electronic community have made fundamentally new types of agreements
both for encoding their scientific efforts into a common core database, and
for the nature of the community interactions with respect to that data.
This proposal involves four projects from three
universities (one from the University of Michigan, two from the University
of Illinois an one from Harvard University). Two of the projects involve
neuroscience issues. One project (U of Michigan) focuses on encoding the
neuroscience knowledge from the community of scientists which studies
the structure and biochemistry of human brains from patients with severe
mental illness. This proposal will actually produce a community
system for the sharing of information. It is based on an object
oriented database and allows commentary and linking within and between all
datatypes, thereby considerably exceeding the capacities of relational
databases and "bulletin boards". Further the biochemical maps of human
brain are capable of cellular resolution and involve the use of a very wide
variety of biochemical probes. This type of histological map nicely
compliments the lower resolution images produced in human imaging studies.
The other neuroscience project (Harvard) will develop a digital map of
human brain using high quality histological source material. This
digital atlas will allow access to several types of data including expert
views of anatomical and terminology systems. The two other projects
emphasize technological development from information and computer
science. The Information Science project (U of Illinois) will
target the designing of strategies for organizing neuroscience and digital
brain map systems. It will emphasize producing an electronic scientific
community, including tools for novel datatypes, linking and retrieving
information, and electronic publishing. The computer science
project plans to design (and implement) tools for handling large number
of complex biological images (U of Illinois) for the two neuroscience
projects and the proper functioning of the information science project.
The end result of the efforts in each of these four projects, as parts of
an integrated program, will be the establishment of the first full
electronic community information system within neuroscience. The program
will produce a large number of the tools and establish many of the methods
needed by most neuroscience communities for their electronic integration
and, as such, represents an important step in the implementation of the
Human Brain Project.