The International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) is a 16-country effort to facilitate neuroscience data sharing, large-scale brain modeling, and cooperation in neuroinformatics research and education. Neuroinformatics integrates information across all levels and scales of neuroscience to help understand the brain and treat disease. The INCF fosters international neuroinformatics infrastructure, which promotes the sharing of data and computing resources within the research community. The INCF also facilitates development of applications that can be used by neuroscientists worldwide. The mission of INCF is to facilitate the work of neuroscientists around the world, and to catalyze and coordinate the global development of neuroinformatics. INCF promotes the sharing of data and computing resources to the international research community.
Programs to be supported by INCF during the 2011 to 2014 period are:
Digital Brain Atlasing: fostering and coordinating interoperability, accessibility and global sharing of reference databases
Ontologies of Neural Structures: standardizing representation of knowledge as the fundamental framework connecting neuroscience research worldwide
Multi-Scale Modeling: promoting interoperable multi-scale model construction and simulation sharing in neuroinformatics
Standards for Data sharing: facilitating international consensus and collaborations for metadata reporting and archiving, and consequently advance data reuse and further analysis.
Training: evaluating and developing best practice training for researchers/students with different backgrounds and high caliber training materials in neuroinformatics.
The members countries of INCF are Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
This award supports U.S. participation in INCF.
