Guiding Principles

In this document we lay out our vision for NeuroBlueprint and datashuttle through three guiding principles.

For additional detail, please refer to our blog posts motivating NeuroBlueprint and datashuttle.

The three guiding principles driving the development of NeuroBlueprint and datashuttle are:

Align with existing community initiatives

BIDS and NWB are the most comprehensive community standards for systems neuroscience projects. Adhering to these specifications ensures complete standardisation e.g. in metadata and file formats. Though extremely valuable, full compliance with these standards can be time-consuming and technically difficult.

NeuroBlueprint’s role is to provide a lightweight standard that can be used to get started, especially during the early phase of a project when things may be very busy. The guiding principle is that some standardisation is better than no standardisation.

NeuroBlueprint is not intended as a rival or replacement for more established specifications, but rather as a stepping stone towards full standardisation. We aim to align as closely as possible to the BIDS specification and in future to provide conversion to NWB through datashuttle.

Strive to be lightweight

NeuroBlueprint aims to keep the specification as lightweight as possible. There is no benefit in the specification proliferating as it develops such that it ends up duplicating BIDS in scope.

In the initial versions (datashuttle v0.4, NeuroBlueprint v0.2), the goal is to have a simple organisational system in which the raw data for different datatypes (e.g. ephys, behaviour) can be automatically discovered in any given project.

In future versions it will be necessary to standardise additional features (e.g. sync pulse metadata) to allow automation of more sophisticated analyses. New standards will always be goal-orientated and customisable, only required to achieve a particular research goal. It is anticipated that as these ‘rules’ are adopted, projects will become progressively easier to convert to BIDS or NWB.

The role of datashuttle will be to enforce these rules in a flexible manner.

Keep releases versioned and modular

NeuroBlueprint and datashuttle will be properly versioned and modular, enabling smooth development over time. New versions will prioritize backward compatibility, with changes that break compatibility occurring infrequently and only aimed at enhancing alignment with existing standards.

Typically, new versions will include new sets of standardisation rules, which users may choose to adopt or not. datashuttle will enforce these in a flexible way, with efforts being made to minimise changes to its API as much as possible.