Feeding the human brain model

The goal of the Human Brain Project is to develop, during the next decade, an infrastructure capable of simulating a draft human brain model based on available experimental data. One of the key issues is therefore to integrate and make accessible the experimental data necessary to constrain and fully specify this model. The required data covers many different spatial scales, ranging from the molecular scale to the whole brain and these data are obtained using a variety of techniques whose measurements may not be directly comparable. Furthermore, these data are incomplete, and will remain so at least for the coming decade. Here we review new neuroinformatics techniques that need to be developed and applied to address these issues.