Standards

Standards drive the type of integration that SPARC is required to achieve. Standards are identified based on the data submitted and user requirements. SPARC adheres to the standards below. For a technical overview of SPARC Standards, see here.

SPARC Overall Standards Strategy

Standards in SPARC should achieve the following:

• Ensure that SPARC data is FAIR through adherence to the FAIR Data Principles, which include rich metadata, FAIR vocabularies, and adherence to community standards.
  • Community standards in use outside of SPARC are preferred when possible. We are particularly monitoring what is coming out of the US BRAIN Initiative, but we should also be looking at other Common Fund projects given the desire to integrate across Common Fund Projects through the Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE).
  • Standards will be developed as necessary for SPARC when none are available. Depending on the nature of the standard, we may create an ad hoc committee of SPARC investigators to work through a problem.
• Improve the user experience by ensuring that SPARC data is harmonized with respect to formats, metadata, etc., to the degree possible, and allows users to write computational tools against SPARC data.

Complying with standards can be hard, particularly without computational support, and frequent updating of standards can place a significant burden on both the data submitter and the infrastructure. Decisions about what standards to use and when will therefore be based on the maturity and support for the standard. The INCF has developed a set of criteria that can help evaluate standards under consideration (Abrams et al. 2019).