Who's it for?
Metaneva is designed mainly for cognitive scientist. We more specifically focus on those cognitive scientists who are interested in more behavioral/functional experiments, with a strong emphasis on single unit recordings, reaction times and behavioral performance effect sizes.
Metaneva therefore is designed for those who want to test a certain paradigm or to run a meta-analysis of a specific brain area or function.
What kind of data is stored?
We obviously do not store every single data set found within the cognitive sciences. This due to practical reasons (highly diverse data sets and reports) and our main focus on integrating species-specific data sets.
Our data set is (for now) limited to rat and monkey data using single unit recordings and reaction times.
Connecting to human data is a long-term goal but requires stable builds of species-specific analytical tools.
What to do if I have questions or comments on the tool?
Go to the Contact page and send us an email. All comments and questions are welcome.
Is Metaneva compliant with other similar workbenches.
Metaneva tries to be compliant with other projects as much as possible. This is an essential part in the development of a bioinformatics tool and is one of the major challenges currently seen within neuroinformatics. It's the attempt to counter and prevent idiosyncratic workbenches.
Therefore, we distribute our descriptive taxonomy and the list of brain areas used in our article upload forms. The specificity of the data however forces us to code a specific database holding our data. With time, it is most likely that we need to extend this database, but we always envision the integration with other workbenches in order to gradually grow towards integrative neural workbenches.
What is an ontology and why do you even bother?
An ontology is a controlled vocabulary, some kind of controlled list of values. The design of an ontology is useful since it allows to use and re-use these value lists across workbenches.
A shared ontology is an essential part in the interoperability of neuroinformatics.
This is currently a very active field within the biomedical disciplines
Where can I download the tool?
You can check out the SVN and all required technical info at sourceforge.
I want to contribute!
A good start as a developer is the wiki. You can check out the current version and read through our dev guidelines.