NIDM — Neuroimaging Data Model

Overview

NIDM (Neuroimaging Data Model) is a semantic data model for representing neuroimaging experiments, statistical results, and analysis provenance, built on the W3C PROV provenance standard. By semantic, it means the data carries machine-readable meaning rather than only file structure. Developed within the ReproNim ecosystem and the NIDASH working group under INCF, NIDM provides a graph-based representation of the neuroimaging research workflow, from acquisition parameters through to analysis pipelines and statistical results. It comprises two main components: NIDM-Experiment, which describes experimental design and dataset metadata using ontology terms, and NIDM-Results, which packages neuroimaging statistical maps with the full provenance of how they were produced. NIDM-Results is natively supported by SPM and FSL, and is accepted by NeuroVault for open sharing of statistical maps with methodological context. NIDM extends BIDS at the semantic layer: where BIDS organises the file structure, NIDM describes the meaning of the data and its provenance, using PROV-O as its formal foundation.

Connections

• producedBy: ReproNim
• extends: BIDS
• extends: PROV-O
• endorsedBy: INCF
• relatedTo: Cognitive Atlas (task ontology for neuroimaging tasks)
• relatedTo: UBERON (anatomy annotations)

Resources

• http://nidm.nidash.org
• https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.10 (Maumet et al. 2016, Scientific Data)
• https://github.com/incf-nidash/nidm-specs