Ontology
A99*
CLCell Ontology
The reference ontology of cell types across organisms, with a large and growing branch of neuron and glial types.
OWLOBOJSON
FAIR 48/48 · 9 adopters
Neuroscience ontologies, schemas & standards
The map of neuroscience ontologies & schemas.
A curated, automatically evaluated catalog of neuroscience ontologies, schemas, vocabularies and data standards. Every entry is scored against the FAIR principles, ontology quality, maintenance and community adoption, with the exact version evaluated and full provenance.
- Resources
- 62
- Categories
- 11
- Adopting projects
- 93
- Avg. score
- 38
Browse by domain
All categories →Anatomy & Brain RegionsStructures of the nervous system, from multi-species anatomy to species-specific brain region hierarchies.13 resourcesAtlases & Reference SpacesCoordinate frameworks and parcellations that anchor data to a common brain space.3 resourcesCell TypesNeuron and glia types, cell taxonomies and the schemas used to annotate them.5 resourcesBehavior & CognitionBehaviors, mental processes, cognitive tasks and experimental paradigms.7 resourcesDisease & PhenotypeNeurological and psychiatric diseases, clinical phenotypes and disorder-specific ontologies.7 resourcesMolecular & SynapticGenes, synaptic functions, neurotransmitters and other chemical entities.3 resourcesNeuroimaging & EventsStandards for organising and describing MRI, EEG/MEG data, results and experimental events.5 resourcesNeurophysiology DataSchemas and terminologies for electrophysiology, optical physiology and behavioral recordings.4 resourcesComputational ModelingLanguages and ontologies for describing neuron, network and brain models.2 resourcesMetadata & Knowledge GraphsMetadata models and knowledge-graph schemas used by neuroscience archives and consortia.9 resourcesUmbrella TerminologiesBroad neuroscience vocabularies and term registries that span many domains.4 resources
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Ontology
A96*
UBERONUber-anatomy Ontology
A cross-species anatomy ontology covering animals, with extensive coverage of nervous system structures. It is the common anatomy backbone for many cell, expression and phenotype resources.
OWLOBOJSON
FAIR 47/48 · 14 adopters
Ontology
A95*
MONDOMondo Disease Ontology
A unified disease ontology that merges many disease resources, with comprehensive coverage of neurological and neurodevelopmental disorders.
OWLOBOJSON
FAIR 48/48 · 6 adopters
Ontology
A92*
GOGene Ontology
Describes gene product functions, processes and locations, including synaptic transmission, neurotransmitter release and neuron development.
OWLOBOJSON
FAIR 48/48 · 6 adopters
Ontology
A89*
FBbtDrosophila Anatomy Ontology
Anatomy of Drosophila melanogaster, including thousands of named neuron types linked to connectome datasets.
OWLOBO
FAIR 48/48 · 2 adopters
Ontology
A88*
HPOHuman Phenotype Ontology
Standard vocabulary of phenotypic abnormalities in human disease, with a large nervous system abnormality branch used in rare-disease diagnostics.
OWLOBOJSON
FAIR 45/48 · 2 adopters
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Vocabulary
E36*
NeurobagelNeurobagel data model and vocabulary
An RDF vocabulary (nb:) and a JSON Schema for data dictionaries that harmonise participant-level metadata (age, sex, diagnosis, assessments, imaging modality, processing pipelines) by annotating BIDS participants.tsv columns with SNOMED CT, NCIt and NIDM terms. The resulting graphs power Neurobagel's federated search across datasets.
JSON SchemaJSON-LDRDF
FAIR 19/48 · 0 adopters
Data standard
C59
BIDSBrain Imaging Data Structure
A community standard for organising and describing neuroimaging and related data: MRI, EEG, MEG, iEEG, PET, microscopy, NIRS, motion, MRS, EMG, eye tracking, and derivatives such as atlases. Its rules are a machine-readable YAML schema, also exported as one JSON file, that renders the specification and drives the BIDS Validator. Metadata fields point to HED, Cognitive Atlas, CogPO, the Cell Ontology, NCBI Taxonomy and RRIDs.
YAML schemaJSONTSV
FAIR 24/48 · 7 adopters
Vocabulary
D50*
HEDHierarchical Event Descriptors
A structured vocabulary and annotation system for describing experimental events in time-series data such as EEG, MEG, fMRI and behavior.
XMLMediaWikiTSV
FAIR 24/48 · 2 adopters
Schema
E31
BICAN modelsBICAN Knowledge Graph Models
LinkML data models for the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) knowledgebase: taxonomies, assertions and evidence, library generation, anatomical structures, genome annotation, donors and a BICAN subset of Biolink. JSON Schema and Pydantic models are generated from the LinkML sources.
LinkMLJSON SchemaPydantic
FAIR 13/48 · 2 adopters
Schema
D40
openMINDS
A set of metadata models and controlled terms for neuroscience graph databases, covering datasets, subjects, methods, software, models and brain atlases (SANDS).
JSON SchemaJSON-LD
FAIR 19/48 · 1 adopter
Schema
D53
DANDI schemaDANDI Archive Metadata Schema
The metadata models of the DANDI neurophysiology archive. Pydantic models in the dandischema library define Dandiset and asset metadata; versioned JSON Schemas plus a JSON-LD context are generated from them and published in the dandi/schema repository. The library also converts Dandiset metadata to DataCite for DOIs.
JSON SchemaJSON-LDPydantic
FAIR 24/48 · 1 adopter
Beyond neuroscience
Looking for another domain?
NeuroSchema covers neuroscience. For ontologies and schemas in every other field, from life sciences, chemistry and earth science to engineering, privacy, law and computing, use our sister catalog SchemaScope. It is scored with the same rubric.
Missing a schema or ontology?
Submit it through GitHub. Every addition is reviewed, validated and evaluated automatically before it is merged.