Goals
Unlike general search engines, NIF provides much deeper access to a focused set of resources that are relevant to neuroscience, search strategies tailored to neuroscience, and access to content that is traditionally “hidden” from web search engines. The NIF is a dynamic inventory of neuroscience databases, annotated and integrated with a unified system of biomedical terminology] (i.e. NeuroLex). NIF supports concept-based queries across multiple scales of biological structure and multiple levels of biological function, making it easier to search for and understand the results. NIF will also provide a registry through which resources providers can disclose availability of resources relevant to neuroscience research. NIF is not intended to be a warehouse or repository itself, but a means for disclosing and locating resources elsewhere available via the web.
The NIFSTD, or NIF Standard Ontology contains many of the terms, synonyms and abbreviations useful for neuroscience, as well as dynamic categories such as defined cell classes based on various properties like neuron by neurotrasmitter or by circuit role or drugs of abuse according to the National Institutes on Drug Abuse. Any term (with associated synonyms) or dynamic category (all terms with their synonyms) can be used to simultaneously query all of the data that NIF currently indexes, please find several examples below:
- available data about the hippocampus including synonyms
- data about parkinson's disease including archaic synonyms like paralysis agitans
- neocortical neuron a dynamic category includes all neurons that have cell soma in any part of the neocortex
Read more about this topic: Neuroscience Information Framework
Famous quotes containing the word goals:
“We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.”
—Philip K. Howard, U.S. lawyer. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, pp. 186-87, Random House (1994)
“If you really think about it, everything is wonderful in this world, everything except for our thoughts and deeds when we forget about the loftier goals of existence, about our human dignity.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one to command, no one to obey, no one to transgress. When you realize there are no goals or objectives, then you realize, too, that there is no chance: for only in a world of objectives does the word “chance” have any meaning.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)