A freely editable semantic wiki for community-based curation of the terms used in Neuroscience. Entries are curated and eventually incorporated into the formal NIFSTD ontology. NeuroLex also includes a Resource branch for community members to freely add neuroscience relevant resources that do not become part of NIFSTD ontology but rather make up the NIF Registry. As part of the NIF, we provide a simple search interface to many different sources of neuroscience information and data. To make this search more effective, we are constructing ontologies to help organize neuroscience concepts into category hierarchies, e.g., neuron is a cell. These categories provide the means to perform more effective searches and also to organize and understand the information that is returned. But an important adjunct to this activity is to clearly define all of the terms that we use to describe our data, e.g., anatomical terms, techniques, organism names. Because wikis provide an easy interface for communities to contribute their knowledge, we started the NeuroLex.

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