Constructing a New-Style Conceptual Model of Brain Data for Systematic Brain Informatics

The development of brain science has led to a vast increase of brain data. To meet requirements of a systematic methodology of Brain Informatics (BI), this paper proposes a new conceptual model of brain data, namely Data-Brain, which explicitly represents various relationships among multiple human brain data sources, with respect to all major aspects and capabilities of human information processing systems (HIPS). A multidimension framework and a BI methodology-based ontological modeling approach have been developed to implement a Data-Brain. The Data-Brain, Data-Brain-based BI provenances, and heterogeneous brain data can be used to construct a Data-Brain-based brain data center which provides a global framework to integrate data, information, and knowledge coming from the whole research process for systematic BI study. Such a Data-Brain modeling approach represents a radically new way for domain-driven conceptual modeling of brain data, which models a whole process of systematically investigating human information processing mechanisms.