file organization, manufacturer name

[bendichter]

I noticed that with NeuroNexus, all the probes that are in a directory called "neuronexus" have a manufacturer "neuronexus". You might think this pattern would be held throughout. However, with neuropixels, they are in a directory called "neuropixel" and have a manufacturer "Imec".

The reason this came up, is we want to point to probe interface library files in the BIDS bep32 extension of microelectrode electrophysiology, but it's unclear how to reference neuropixel probes. Our current instructions are to use the manufacturer and model ids. This should work in the sense that it uniquely defines a probe, but the way this repo is currently organized, where the path of a probe is not a simple function of these values, it is difficult to know (or develop a function to determine) where the probe lives.

Would it be possible to reorganize the probes so that they all follow the organizational structure where the directory name is the name of the manufacturer?

[alejoe91]

I think it would be good to keep a consistent {manufacturer}/{model_name} organization throughout the library, but this issue is not only for the neuropixels folder. Also plexon and sinaps have inconsistencies.

For neuropixels, I think it's straightforward and consistent to rename neuropixels to imec.

In some cases, this is more complicated. Take the plexon example: we currently have Plexon-Sinaps as manufacturer, but this is not strictly correct, since Plexon is a distributor of the Sinaps probes...so the whole thing is a bit fuzzy at the moment.

@samuelgarcia I think we should re-organize the structure and be a bit more consistent with the naming. what do you think?

[bendichter]

ok well the real issue is we need a way to uniquely identify a probe in a way that allows us to construct the path to the probe specification file.

[samuelgarcia]

Hi Ben,
OK for renaming neuropixel to imec.
We can put a readme to inform a visitor that imec is the neuropixels manufacturer for people not awre and looking for it.

[alejoe91]

Let's also add a tag, so we can safely change things and point to a specific version

[bendichter]

Alternatively we could add a lookup table mapping manufacturer and model to a url