| 9 | | (...) |
| | 11 | Brain atlases are important tools of neuroscience. Traditionally |
| | 12 | prepared in paper book format, more and more commonly they take digital |
| | 13 | form which extends their utility. To simplify work with different |
| | 14 | atlases, to lay the ground for developing universal tools which could |
| | 15 | abstract from the origin of the atlas, efforts are being made to |
| | 16 | provide common interfaces to these atlases. 3D Brain Atlas |
| | 17 | Reconstructor service (3dBARs) described here is a repository of |
| | 18 | digital representations of different brain atlases in CAF format which |
| | 19 | we recently proposed and a repository of 3D models of brain structures. |
| | 20 | A graphical front-end is provided for creating and viewing the |
| | 21 | reconstructed models as well as the underlying 2D atlas data. An |
| | 22 | application programming interface (API) facilitates programmatic access |
| | 23 | to the service contents from other websites. From a typical |
| | 24 | user's point of view, 3dBARs offers an accessible way |
| | 25 | to mine publicly available atlasing data with a convenient browser |
| | 26 | based interface, without the need to install extra software. For a |
| | 27 | developer of services related to brain atlases, 3dBARs supplies |
| | 28 | mechanisms for enhancing functionality of other software. The policy of |
| | 29 | the service is to accept new datasets as delivered by interested |
| | 30 | parties and we work with the researchers who obtain original data to |
| | 31 | make them available to the neuroscience community at large. The |
| | 32 | functionality offered by the 3dBARs situates it at the core of present |
| | 33 | and future general atlasing services tying it strongly to the global |
| | 34 | atlasing neuroinformatics infrastructure. |
