Vision
The NeuroWebLab provides real-time interactive Web tools to work collaboratively on public biomedical data, such as MRI and histology.
The value of real-time collaboration
Real-time interaction provides a largely unexplored methodology for neuroscientific collaboration. For several years we have been exploring different distributed collaboration paradigms, representing various ways in which neuroscientists could work together, both in the analysis of public data, and in the co-construction of new knowledge. Our aim is to go beyond the state of the art by allowing scientists to work at the same time on the same data, through the Web. Many of the challenges which may appear daunting to a single research team – even to a large one – could be solved much more efficiently, transparently and reproducibly by engaging the complete community. Our project builds a collaborative layer on top of existing initiatives: It turns the massive amounts of passively stored data into living matter for distributed, real-time collaboration.