NeuroML Team and Specification Committees
The members of the NeuroML Team are responsible for implementing and testing the NeuroML specifications, maintaining the website and validator, organizing workshops and other events, and obtaining funding specifically for coordinating the further development of NeuroML. Version 2.0 of the NeuroML language is being developed by the Specification Committees.Contributors
There is a growing list of people who have contributed to the development of the NeuroML Specifications. If we missed you, please let us know! Thank you everyone for your generous contributions over the past few years.Dave Beeman, Upi Bhalla, Robert Cannon, Hugo Cornelis, Andrew Davison, Nicolas Debeissat, Nigel Goddard, Michael Hines, Fred Howell, Michael Hucka, Tom Morse, Weihong Qi, Mike Schachter, Kavita Shankar, Joseph Svitak
Special thanks to Sushil Kambampati, Greg Golden, and Nicola McDonnell for their contributions to technical issues.
Also, thank you to Gwen Jacobs, Laszlo Zaborszky, and Zoltan Nadasdy for their thoughtful suggestions regarding neuroanatomical descriptions.
Thank you to everyone who attended the 1st official NeuroML Development Workshop for their valuable contributions: Georgio Ascoli, Dave Beeman, Sandra Berger, Guy Billings, Avrama Blackwell, Hugo Cornelis, Erik De Schutter, Andrew Davison, Lyle Graham, Sean Hill, Michael Hines, Nicolas De Novère, Nathan Lepora, Henrik Lindén, Michele Mattioni, Ivan Raikov, Subhasis Ray, Arnd Roth, and Koen Vervaeke. Organizers were Robert Cannon, Sharon Crook, Padraig Gleeson, and Angus Silver.
Thanks also to the participants in the 2010 NeuroML Development Workshop: Murat Alp, Guy Billings, Avrama Blackwell, Upi Bhalla, Ted Carnevale, Robert Cannon, Hugo Cornelis, Sharon Crook, Andrew Davison, Suzanne Dietrich, Padraig Gleeson, Mike Hucka, Stephen Larson, Henrik Linden, Michele Mattioni, Alfredo Rodriguez, and Angus Silver.
A Brief History of NeuroML...
The term "NeuroML" was first introduced in a paper in 2001 by Goddard et al., Towards NeuroML: Model description methods for collaborative modeling in neuroscience following meetings in Edinburgh at which initial templates for the language structures were discussed. The proposal built on general purpose structures proposed by Gardner et al (2001) Common Data Model for Neuroscience Data and Data Model Exchange.At that time, the concept of NeuroML was closely linked with a particular software architecture in which a base application loads a range of plugins to handle different aspects of a simulation problem. This was realized in Neosim (Howell et al 2003) and early NeuroML development was closely aligned to this approach. Howell and Cannon developed a software library, the NeuroML Development Kit, to simplify the process of working with XML serializations of models. It implemented a particular dialect of XML (including the "listOfXXX" structure which also found its way into SBML) but did not define any particular structures at the model description level. Instead, Neosim plugin developers were free to invent their own structures and serialize them via the NDK, in the hope that some consensus would emerge around the most useful ones. In practice, few developers beyond the Edinburgh group developed or used such structures and the resulting XML was too application specific to gain wider adoption. The Neosim project was wound up in 2005.
Around this time, Sharon Crook was working independently on a language for describing neuronal morphologies in XML, MorphML (Qi, W. and S. Crook (2004)), and Padraig Gleeson working with Angus Silver was developing neuroConstruct for generating neuronal simulations for the NEURON and GENESIS simulators, which had its own internal simulator independent representation for morphologies, channel and networks. It was agreed that these efforts should be merged under the banner of NeuroML, and the current structure of NeuroML (split into 3 Levels and containing MorphML, ChannelML and NetworkML) was created, to allow application developers to choose which parts of the language to support. XML Schema files for this version of the standard have been available from the Sourceforge NeuroML development site since 2006.
See the Roadmap for the plans for future development of NeuroML.