Why are there so many different types of brain parts?
There are many different ways to divide up the brain. Although Neurolex takes a structural approach, i.e., we haven’t yet defined neural systems like the visual system, we are still left with gross anatomy, cytoarchitecture, chemoarchitecture and connectivity, to name a few. Neurolex is concerned with building formal vocabularies for information systems. We therefore have to make sure that we create our ontologies as cleanly as possible, without mixing up all of these different types of parts. However, we don’t expect a naive user to navigate all of these complexities. We therefore set up a few different types of categories into which users can deposit their brain parts. We are still trying to determine whether this is a useful exercise or not, but so far it seems to be working. We have started a page where we document our current categories (http://neurolex.org/wiki/Brain_parts_organization).
