The Challenge of Bridging Between Disciplines

This issue of JAMIA contains the first of two sets of papers4 coming out of the Human Brain Project . With one exception, these papers are written by people who are grounded in neuroinformatics (the intersection of neuroscience and bioinformatics). They are working on problems that are analogous to the ones being tackled by researchers in biomedical informatics. Nonetheless, they come at these problems from a different perspective. Although they use many of the same words to describe what they do, the careful reader with a background in biomedical informatics will find that the words mean something different to them. For example, Gardner et al.5 use metadata as “the neurobiological descriptors characterizing neurophysiology datasets.” In other words, their metadata describe the experimental context in which the data were acquired. This difference in use is explicitly stated in the text, but it may be missed by someone who has a different expectation about the meaning.