To accommodate different needs across species, NeuronBank will create a federation of knowledge-bases. Our BranchKB package will create the nodes in this federation. Each BranchKB will consist of an extensible online knowledge base, enabling a community of neuroscientists to work together to represent their knowledge of identified neurons in a particular species or brain region. NeuronBank Central will unite different BranchKBs, using a Meta-Server component that will maintain a directory of available resources and coordinate searches across multiple knowledge bases. Together, these components will present a united client framework, enabling the development of diverse NeuronBank clients to browse, analyze, and contribute to extant knowledge of identified neurons and the circuits they form. In addition to a web client, we are working on a specialized visualization client.

Figure 1: Interactions between system components (top, right) and functionality within each component.