BIDS-Processed meeting summary
Last month (Aug 22th-24th, 2018) we hosted a 3 day meeting at Stanford University to further extend the BIDS standard into the processed derivatives domain. We invited an international group representing many different organizations (i.e. MRN, HCP, Invicro, NDA) and analysis packages (i.e. FSL, FreeSurfer, ANTs, dipy, nilearn). The goal of this meeting was to work on solidifying the current draft of the proposal.
The meeting was designed around having both whole group discussions and breakout groups to develop several different BEPs (BIDS Extension Proposals). We found it was very useful to organize in this way to hold both general derivatives discussions and allow for more specific conversations within the group. The meeting direction followed a expand, narrow, and finalize path. The expand phase included idea generation and putting forward several different proposals, as well as outlining the needs of prospective users and developers whose workflows will need to incorporate BIDS standards. Day 2 began the narrowing phase, in which the ideas and challenges raised during expansion were slowly addressed and proposals were moved towards finalized form. Between each phase the BEP teams presented their work to the whole group to acquire feedback and ensure consistency across each BEP. This allowed challenges that occurred to one group but affected others to be raised and addressed as a community. Online communication during the meeting was hosted on Riot, and all derivatives proposals were managed through shared google documents. These components ensured that interested off-site researchers could join into the discussions, and BEP derivatives teams could communicate in real time.
Looking forward, we plan on finalizing a division of the derivatives specification by the end of year. Briefly, on October 1st there will be a first release candidate. At that time, no additional data types or derivatives should be added. Then, every 2 weeks thereafter another round of release candidates will be provided. There will be a total of 4 rounds of release candidates. Between which there will be opportunities to make suggestions, and raise challenges. The final version of the derivatives initially presented on October 1st will be merged with the main specification on December 1st. Further information on this plan can be found on this mailing list post.
We would like to thank everyone for all the fantastic discussions and hard work!
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