Data

Neuroscience data are heterogeneous and multi-dimensional, and it is evident that the volume, speed, and complexity of data is growing beyond the current capacity of existing analytical systems.

High-throughput molecular analyses, as well as neuroimaging and sensor technologies, are generating petabyte-sized datasets daily, and high compute speeds are required for rapid analytics at this scale. Existing environments cannot contend with the scale and diversity of data that will be required for breakthrough discovery at petabyte scale. At this scale, transferring data becomes cost- and time-prohibitive, therefore computation, tools, analysis and researchers have to be moved to the data.

The BRAIN Commons is leveraging what has been learned from the United States National Cancer Institute’s Genomic Data Commons and builds upon those data standards for managing data. This infrastructure allows for a data commons that will scale beyond the petabyte level; is interoperable; and offers co-location of data, storage and computing infrastructure facilitating data harmonization, data analysis and data sharing in the cloud.

The Graph Data Model is the central method of organization of all data ingested by the BRAIN Commons. This is designed to maintain data and metadata consistency and accommodates multiple types of heterogenous data found in brain research. This is essential so that we can enable data integration and analyses within and across cohorts, allowing our analyses to work across all projects within and across clouds. This also allows for computation to happen in a co-located place so that one can compute over the data in a safe and complaint way, taking computation to the data for multiple users simultaneously.

We no longer have to move data around; now, we move to the data.

These data will include:

1. Preclinical Data
2. Clinical Data
3. Imaging Data
4. Electrophysiology Data
5. Genomic and other Molecular *.omic Data
6. Digital Health Data
7. Social Media and other Unstructured Data

Data will be stored in three zones:

Zone 1 – Public Access

Data designated as Public Access will be accessible to any user once they are a member of the BRAIN Commons.

Zone 2 – Qualified Access

Data designated as Controlled Access will be accessible to any Authorized user of the BRAIN Commons once the Data Access Committee has received, authenticated and approved a Zone Access Application form.

Zone 3 – Private Access

Data designated as Exclusive Access will be accessible only to the data contributor and authorized users specifically authorized by the data contributor.

Are you interested in contributing data to the BRAIN Commons? Learn more about How to Participate.