NIF v4.0 - Release Comments

We are pleased to announce the release of NIF v4.0, which went live during the week of December 5th, 2011. NIF v4.0 has a number of features that improve overall performance of the Neuroscience Information Framework, as well as user focused features to improve navigation in the search results.

On the backend, we now have Solr serving our Lucene indices. With Solr, we can access advanced search functionality while processing queries to NIF. Also, our system has been upgraded to solid-state drives (SSD) to improve retrieval performance.

For the end-user, there have been a few features that are highlighted with the release of NIF v4.0 that we would like to expand on. Many users familiar with NIF know that we have a mountain of neuroscience-related data  - some 336 million records. While searching for data, users often are looking for a smaller subset than a simple search result can provide. To achieve this, users are now able to "Filter" on each column within the Data Federation. The filtering functionality limits the search result set to records containing the filtered string. For example, in the NIF Integrated Animals view, results are retrieved across the Rat Genome Database (RGD), International Mouse Strain Resource (IMSR), Caenorhabditis Genetic Center (CGC), and Zebrafish International Resouce Center (ZIRC). If a researcher is only looking for potential zebrafish animal models, they are now able to use "zebrafish" as a filter on the "Organism" column. A video tutorial for the Filtering feature is available at NIF 4.0 - Advanced Search Filtering Functions.

NIF users also desired a way to save search results or at least a snapshot of them while they try out different searches. One way to achieve this, is to "Load in a new window", which is available on all data sources in NIF v4.0. Clicking this button will, as it suggests, loads the current result set into a new window useful for data comparisons. Additionally, users are able to use the "Export" feature, which is not new to NIF v4.0, but permits more through massaging of search results using popular spreadsheet or data analysis software. Lastly, the "View in Pivot" option desires some mention. Pivot is an exploratory interface available for most Image data type resources. This interface allows users to dynamically organize and sort images into various categories provided by the resource.  A video tutorial highlighting each of these features is available at NIF 4.0 - Advanced Search Results Features - New Window, Pivot and Export.

Lastly, NIF Literature has received some noteworthy improvements. The literature indices, gathered from PubMed and PubMed Central (open-access), have been collapsed into a single tab with the release of NIF v4.0. Additionally, we have provided "facets" for the user. Facets are produced from the top result count across Year, Authors and Journals. This way, users are able to quickly reduce search results to a particular area of interest, as well as gather a quick overview of the top authors or journals related to their search string. A video tutorial highlighting these features is available at NIF 4.0 - Scientific Literature Search & Faceting

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to visit the NIF Forum to post and become engaged in the discussion!