SPARC Portal Roadmap

The overall vision and primary goals of the SPARC Portal - originally established to support the SPARC program - are to provide an open, sustainable online resource and infrastructure for peripheral neurosciences and bioelectronic medicine to the global scientific community and to foster collaboration. This scope represents a natural evolution from the first SPARC phase, when the SPARC Portal focused on the autonomic nervous system and on facilitating the exploration and use of the NIH SPARC Program’s scientific outputs, which include data, computational models, analysis pipelines, maps, standards, knowledge management, methodologies, and tools. The SPARC Portal, as well as established SPARC DRC infrastructure and curation services, will be offered and actively supported beyond the duration of the SPARC funding. They will continue to be maintained and enhanced with funding from institutional commitments, follow-up grants, and commercial offerings. The SPARC Portal and DRC will further broaden their mission to support open neurosciences and systems physiology “bridging the body and the brain” and ultimately drive the development of treatments that change lives.

Roadmap: Short Term (2024)

Functionality planned for roll out until the end of 2024

• Harmonized and extended documentation
  • Extensive documentation of the Data Resource Center (DRC) resources
  • Application for Core Trust Seal
  • Clear messaging on the home page regarding functions and features available to SPARC users with links to tutorials
  • Publication of scientific papers providing technical background, application illustrations, and discussion of the SPARC Portal and DRC infrastructure functionality
• Community building
  • Revised About page
  • SPARC dataset publication information available on a user’s ORCiD profile
• Search and supporting infrastructure
  • Complex queries across data objects are supported (e.g., all samples collected using a particular protocol, or all images related to subjects from a particular strain across all of the SPARC efforts)
  • Improvements to faceted browse
• Facilitation of collaborative work
  • Functionalities and standards for publishing and sharing data aggregations and explorable data analyses
  • Enhancements to o²S²PARC for collaborative computational modeling and simulations (e.g. tagging of other users, task assignment, workflow commenting, study discussions)
• Launch data-specific functionality directly from the SPARC Portal
  • Ability to preview simulation datasets that can be further studied using OpenCOR or o²S²PARC (e.g. with the Simulation Viewer )
  • Ability to launch other external applications (e.g., SPARC Dataset Viewer, see here)
• SPARC Portal user login
  • Elaboration of user profile page
  • Unified Portal and o²S²PARC login via ORCID
• SPARC data submission
  • Formalization of process for non-SPARC investigators to submit data to the SPARC Portal
  • Increased automation of data and model submission
  • Formalization, publication and promotion of the computational Minimal Information Standard to ensure FAIRness of models published on the SPARC Portal
  • Release of new version of the SPARC Dataset Structure (SDS) standard to accommodate additional data types and promote future functionality
• New query interface to review connections in SimpleSCKAN
• Maps and scaffolds:
  • Understanding connectivity and physiological function by:
    • Adding the capability to the SPARC portal maps to enable experts to contribute to the body of evidence for new (not yet displayed) and existing connectivity.
    • Ensuring synchronization of the content and display of anatomical connectivity (AC), functional connectivity (FC) and whole-body scaffold maps
    • Developing new vagus nerve 3D scaffolds for embedding data on the organization of vagus nerve fascicles
    • Constructing the 3D vagus nerve scaffolds from REVA projects data, mapping data to it and developing 2D/flatmap representation of each individual vagus map
    • Developing a female 3D whole body scaffold map
    • Addition of nerve scaffolds to the 3D whole body scaffolds map
  • Enhancing microscopy imaging and data viewing tools by:
    • Adding features in Biolucida for users to enrich microscopy image data with FAIR tags drawn from SPARC vocabularies and annotations for improved querying/surfacing of SPARC Portal images
    • Providing access to SPARC Neurolucida 360 and Neurolucida Explorer software on the SPARC Portal to enable users to analyze microscopy images from existing SPARC datasets, regardless of their size and the computational power often required to run computationally-intensive automated tracing algorithms
• API to enable developers to leverage the DRC infrastructure in their tools
  • Extension of the o²S²PARC API with functionality, such as: personal preferences, remaining simulation hours, deployment hardware selection, environment variables & token & 3rd party API keys & licensing information, real time streaming of progress information
• Support SPARC Phase 2 projects
  • REVA, VESPA , HORNET
  • Provide required infrastructure on the SPARC Portal
  • Expanding dataset feature to include two new dataset types: GitHub Releases and Collections
  • Introduce a ‘Device’ category on the Portal
• Composition, configuration, and launching of computational models directly from the SPARC Portal
• Portal dashboard backed by quantitative database of SPARC data (initially focusing on vagal anatomy data from REVA)
  • query and statistical analysis infrastructur
  • dynamic visualization & dashboard-creation functionality on the Portal
  • data registration to common scaffold
  • leveraging of variability information in the context of modeling uncertainty assessment
• In silico modelling to generate regulatory evidence on neural interface safety and efficacy
  • generate template studies based on HORNET module
  • leveraging variability information from quantitative dataset
  • uncertainty propagation (properties, anatomical variability)
  • risk assessment (dosimetric exposure, charge injection, tissue damage, heating, etc.)
  • electrophysiological response & stimulation selectivity assessment

Continuously ongoing activities will include

• User support (e.g., via SPARC Portal Feedback form and Open Office Hours)
  • Continue to provide licences of microscopy image analysis and segmentation software, Neurolucida 360 and Neurolucida Explorer, for SPARC researchers and the Phase 2 community
• Community building
  • Success stories, PI video interviews
  • Display of extended SPARC usage metrics on the SPARC Portal
  • Webinars, office hours, fireside chats
  • Outreach at conferences (e.g., NANS, Computational Neuroscience (CNS), FENS, ISAN, Neuromod, and APS)
  • Social media outreach
  • Promoting relevant events and news on the SPARC Portal
• APIs to empower developers
  • Continuous extension of the APIs to all DRC components
  • Further Integration and development of the joint API and SPARC Python client
  • Development of tutorials to show how to leverage the SPARC Python Client to interact with the different DRC components
• Search and supporting infrastructure
  • Metadata annotation and indexing will be extended to the individual file level and to computational models

Roadmap: Longer Term (beyond 2024)

• Support for SPARC Phase 2
  • The Reconstructing Vagal Anatomy (REVA) initiative is creating more precise and detailed maps of the human vagus nerve, a bioelectronic highway that carries two-way electrical signals between the brain and internal organs of the body
    • continue development of the SPARC Portal and associated tools to host and work with these data products
  • The VNS Endpoints from Standardized Parameters (VESPA) initiative is identifying the physiological effects of altering vagus nerve activity to discover how best to stimulate nerve fibers for specific therapeutic effects
    • continue development of the SPARC Portal and associated tools to host and work with these data products
  • The Human Open Research Neural Engineering Technologies (HORNET) initiative is developing open-source technologies and components needed to safely and effectively alter nerve function
    • support the design, safety and performance assessment and optimization, and the development of control strategies
• Compatibility with other research initiatives
  • Harmonization with research produced by other initiatives will be achieved with an increasing number of repositories and standards (the first already in 2024)
• Search and supporting infrastructure
  • In the SPARC Portal, users will be able to combine searches based on maps (i.e., abstract or concrete representations of functional and anatomical relations) and graphs/ontologies (i.e., annotations that translate to unambiguous, standardized terminologies or represent relationships)
  • Given a particular entry on the SPARC Portal (e.g., dataset, image, etc.), users will have the ability to search the broader community by linking out to SciCrunch, PubMed, or other indexing servicess
• Bridging the gap between experimental data collection and computational modeling
• Ensuring reproducibility and FAIRness for data processing (e.g., shareable and explorable analyses, standardized machine learning)
• Providing a page on the SPARC Portal that provides information about the DRC plans and actions in view of sustainability beyond SPARC funding, along with an associated mechanism for the community to offer feedback
• Teaching
  • Adapt the SPARC Portal to support visualizations and interactions that are valuable for teaching
  • Support the creation of online teaching classes