BRAIN Cell Data Center

# BRAIN Cell Data Center
## Description
The BRAIN Cell Data Center (BCDC) will support the goals of the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network (BICCN) by providing a foundational community resource for housing single-cell centered data content in the brain. We will lead, together with BICCN data generation partners, in the development and deployment of fundamental data models, common community standards, data, and scientific results to improve our understanding of the diverse cell types in the mammalian brain and its organizational logic. 

# Roles
[Primary Investigator] Lydia Ng (lydian@alleninstitute.org)
[Primary Investigator] Michael Hawrylycz (mikeh@alleninstitute.org)
[Metadata standards and Data Wrangling] Carol Thompson (carolth@alleninstitute.org)   
[Grant and Consortium Administration] Florence D'Orazi (florence.dorazi@alleninstitute.org)   

## Definitions [Optional]
CCF: The CCF is the "common coordinate framework", a three-dimensional coordinate space corresponding to mouse brain to be used as a standard reference for anatomical coordinates. 

## Objectives
- Develop a data collection, quantification, and mapping framework for managing data and information across diverse repositories.
- Host a web portal to provide information about the consortium, enable users to find useful datasets, and direct users to raw data at archives.
- Serve as a "data archive" for extracted features suitable for search and navigation in the web portal.

## In-scope
- Manage metadata standards and achieve community alignment.
- Develop policies, processes and infrastructure to support metadata collection and management.
- Provide inventory reporting for raw data.
- Develop web portal for basic consortium information.
- Provide searchable metadata for consortium datasets.
- Host more advanced data search and navigation for a subset of experiments including both metadata and extracted features.
- Support CCF mapping through the provision of instructions and tools to data generation centers.

## Out-of-scope
- Performing CCF mapping for data generators.
- Providing advanced visualization for all datasets.

# Communication
## Slack Channels
[SlackApp/channel](https://slackapp.slack.com/messages/channel)   
Describe the purpose of the channel.

## Github repositories
[BCDC documentation](https://github.com/BICCN/BCDC-documentation)   
NOTE: this repository is currently outdated.