Our work as a contractor to MIT on the DANDI Archive's web application, documentation, example notebooks, and data tools
The DANDI Archive is funded by the NIH BRAIN Initiative through a National Institute of Mental Health resource grant (R24MH117295) to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with Satrajit Ghosh as contact principal investigator and Yaroslav Halchenko of Dartmouth College as the other principal investigator. The grant began in August 2019 and was renewed in 2024 for a project period that runs through April 2029. The renewal aims to bring analysis applications to the archive’s data, extend search into individual data streams, and improve interoperability with other neurophysiology tools. CatalystNeuro contributes to the DANDI software as a contractor to MIT under this grant.
Our work spans the archive’s web application, its documentation, and the tools that prepare data for it. In the web application we have added a How to Cite tab with several citation formats, release notes for published versions, key:value search operators, and a Notebooks tab on each Dandiset’s landing page, and we write a large share of the DANDI documentation. We maintain the example notebooks collection at notebooks.dandiarchive.org, and we built the Dandiset Metadata Assistant, which lets curators propose metadata improvements to Dandiset owners, and DANDI Atlas, a 3D viewer of the Allen mouse brain atlas linked to DANDI data. dandi validate also runs our NWB Inspector on files before upload.