Cognitive Atlas Paper accepted at Frontiers in Neuroinformatics

Our paper describing the Cognitive Atlas project in detail has just been accepted at Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, and the provisional PDF is accessible from here.  The paper lays out the project in much more detail than we have elsewhere, and I would recommend that anyone planning to work seriously on the project first read this paper.

New Release of Cognitive Atlas

Yesterday we pushed the latest version of the Cognitive Atlas to the production site, after many months of development.  I'd like to give a quick tour of some of the new features.

Overall organization.  In the new version we have reduced the prominence of assertions as a separate feature. Instead, assertions are simply integrated with tasks and concepts via the relation browsers. 

Dashboard.  When you log into your account, you are now taken to a dashboard that shows the latest activity on the site, recent comments, and most viewed concepts, tasks, and assertions.

Concept Browser.  There are now two views of each concept under separate tabs on the concept page.  The atlas view provides a graphical view of the relations between a concept and other concepts, while the list view provides a simpler list.  This new system should scale much better to larger numbers of relations.  We have also separated the display of measurement relations into a different panel from other ontological relations.

Task Browser.  We have a new, much more compact view of task conditions, concepts, and indicators.  We also have new tabbed panes for measurement relations and task phylogeny relations.  Here again the goal was primarily to allow the display to scale to cases where there is a large amount of information.

Neurosynth integration. We have included a new tab in the visualization panel (next to the PubMed tab) for terms that are included in the Neurosynth database, which links directly to those pages.  In the future we plan to have direct integration of the neurosynth browser into this panel.

Concept forking. We now have a button on each page that allows one to "fork" a concept, which is the last resort when a term has more than one different sense.  Use this with care!

Curation features.  Each concept and task page now has a button labeled "Flag this item for review by the curator" which will notify us that the page needs to be examined by a curator.  As we being to exert more effort on the curation side, this will be an important behind-the-scenes feature.

Please take a look at the new site and give us feedback about the new features or any bugs that you find.