BrainFrame: a knowledge visualization system for the neurosciences

Neuroscience has benefited from an explosion of new experimental techniques; many have only become feasible in the wake of improvements in computing speed and data storage. At the same time, these new computation-intensive techniques have led to a growing gulf between the data and the knowledge extracted from those data. That is, in the neurosciences there is a paucity of effective knowledge management techniques and an accelerating accumulation of experimental data. The purpose of the project described in the present paper is to create a visualization of the knowledge base of the neurosciences. At run-time, this ‘BrainFrame’ project accesses several web-based ontologies and generates a semantically zoomable representation of any one of many levels of the human nervous system.