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The NIF Resources

The NIF has assembled a set of different types of resources to aid users in locating relevant information.

1. The NIF Registry:  Central to the NIF resources is the NIF registry, a human-curated database of neuroscience-relevant resources available through the web.  The NIF registry was assembled by neuroscientists who vetted each resource for its content and relevance and annotated it using the NIF vocabularies according to their type, coverage and general content.  For more information about the NIF registry, see http://neurogateway.org. 
2. Neuroscience literature:  A rich archive of neuroscience-related literature from the main neuroscience journals, indexed using the Textpresso literature-mining tool.  Each article is indexed according to the full text according to neuroscience-specific concepts. 
3. Neuroscience databases:  The NIF provides the ability to directly query databases containing neuroscience-related data, e.g., images, activation loci, that are independently created and maintained.  This type of search accesses the content of the databases directly, providing access to data that is normally not available to search engines.  In order to be accessed by this search, database providers must register their database to the NIF data federation.  This service is currently offered as a prototype, and includes 4 databases: 
1. SUMS DB: a repository of brain-mapping data (surfaces and volumes; structural and functional data) from many laboratories.
2. Senselab NeuronDB and CellPropDB:  A database of neurons and their properties, e.g., ion channels, receptors
3. Neuromorpho.org: a centrally curated inventory of digitally reconstructed neurons. NeuroMorpho.Org contains contributions from over two-dozen labs and is continuously updated as new morphological reconstructions are collected, published, and shared, with the goal of densely covering all available data.
4. CCDB: a web accessible database for high resolution 2D, 3D and 4D data from light and electron microscopy, including correlated imaging.
4. NIFWeb:  A customized web index built from sites indexed within the NIF registry.  The NIFWeb uses the Nutch search engine, which provides additional query functions and clustering of results.
5. Neuroscience Portals: Many groups have created science-related portals that themselves access multiple information sources.  The NIF provides access to these portals, e.g., Science.gov.