New INCF Infrastructure: InterLex

Continually striving to provide researchers in the fields of neuroscience and neuroinformatics with the most appropriate and effective solutions for their research needs, INCF is proud to announce InterLex as the newest addition to our Infrastructure Portfolio. 

With an organ as complex as the brain, let alone the complexity of its constituent parts (e.g., cerebral cortex), being able to clearly define anatomical and functional neuroscientific terms across various databases is crucial in minimizing overlap, confusion, and error when comparing disparate brain datasets. Built on top of (and now incorporating) the existing NeuroLex, InterLex aims to improve the way that biomedical scientists communicate about their data, facilitating more effective data integration across distributed resources. InterLex, a dynamic lexicon of biomedical terms, grew out of and is a core component of SciCrunch, a cooperative data platform developed by the FAIR Data Informatics Lab at the University of California, San Diego, used by diverse communities in making data more FAIR. 

InterLex models terms using primitives of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and can export directly to a variety of standard ontology formats. Given the already numerous existing terminologies, lexicons, and ontologies in the fields of neuroscience and neuroanatomy, InterLex aims to serve as a stable top layer, providing a set of inter-lexical and inter-data-lexical mappings. INCF applauds and supports the InterLex project and its efforts in minimizing the inconsistent use of terminology in both neuroscientific databases and literature.

InterLex is supported by projects such as the Neuroscience Information Framework project (NIF), the NIDDK Information Network (dkNET), and the Open Data Commons for Spinal Cord Injury.