Welcome to the BIDS Starter Kit#
Motivation#
The primary goal of this project is to simplify the process of learning about the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS). We hope that the resources in this wiki, such as links to tutorials, easy-to-read documentation, and code will make BIDS easier to adopt. In order to remain up to date with the continuously changing BIDS specifications, we have adopted a similarly open model to allow contributions from the community.
Project Summary#
Neuroimaging and neurophysiology data can be costly in both time and money to acquire. This creates a barrier for many underfunded researchers without access to the required equipment. Responsible data sharing can level the playing field, but the many different specifications of these acquired images cause portability issues between different labs and scientists. BIDS is a framework for organizing data that standardizes file organization and dataset description between different researchers.
How do I find information?#
For general information to help you get started with BIDS, we recommend browsing this book. It includes pages such as an overall introduction to the BIDS folder structure, links to tutorials, and a glossary to help you with some of the technical terms.
For metadata file templates or code to help you get started, please scroll up to find the appropriate files that are available in your language of choice.
Finally, for more advanced knowledge that may pertain to specific use cases for your data, please refer to the full BIDS Specification
Philosophy#
The most important part of BIDS are the users: if more people use it, more data will be shared and the more powerful it will become. We want to make it easy to learn and more adopted. Since BIDS is platform independent and still an adapting, growing tool, the greater the community, the better it will be.
Another part is that BIDS is striving to not reinventing other standards and metadata ontologies but reuse them:
Benefits#
For the public good#
Lowers scientific waste
Gives opportunity to less-funded researchers
Improves efficiency
Spurs innovation
For yourself#
You are likely the future user of the data and data analysis pipelines you’ve developed
Enables and simplifies collaboration
Reviewers and funding agencies like to see reproducible results
Open-science based funding opportunities and awards available (for instance: OHBM Replication Award, Mozilla Open Science Fellowship, Google Summer of Code, and so on.)
Users#
BIDS is for everyone! Programming is not required, it simply makes some
processes more efficient. All users can take part in the benefits such as
organized data, reproducible research, and data sharing.
Acknowledgements#
Sponsor Organizations#
