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The NIF Components

The current NIF system is built from open source components including GWT, Nutch, Lucene, Flex and Postgres. Current NIF tools include the following:

  1. The NIF Registry:  Central to the NIF resources is the NIF registry, a human-curated Postgres database of neuroscience-relevant resources available through the web.  The NIF registry is assembled by neuroscientists who vet each resource for its content and relevance and annotate it using the NIF vocabularies according to their type, coverage and general content. 
  2. NIF Literature:  A rich archive of neuroscience-related literature from the main neuroscience journals, indexed using the Textpresso literature-mining tool.  Each article's full text is indexed and can be searched by neuroscience-specific concepts.. 
  3. NIF Data Federation: 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 provides individual records in the databases directly, and these data are not normally available to search engines.  In order to be accessed by this search, database providers must register their database with the NIF data federation.
  4. NIFWeb: A customized Web index built from sites indexed within the NIF registry. NIFWeb uses the Nutch search engine, which provides additional query functions and clustering of results.
  5. NIFSTD Vocabulary: NIF encourages the use and re-use of the vocabularies. For this reason, it was developed with and adheres to the general pirnciples of the OBO foundry standards.
  6. NeuroLex: Wiki-based interface for community to help build and refine the NIF ontologies.
  7. Ontoquest: A system that provides powerful yet easy-to-use query and reasoning utilities.
  8. NIF Search Tools:
  9. NIF Services: Programmatic access to NIF tools through Web services was released with NIF 2.0.
  10. NIF Curator Tools: CINdy (Curation INterface) is a Web application for cataloging Web resources and the NIF Registry, and for assigning specified metadata elements.
  11. NIF Registration Tools:
    1. Level 2: DISCO protocol is a tool, which any Web resource can send automatic data update to the NIF system.
    2. Level 3
    3. Concept Mapping

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