Ideas for a BrainGlobe DataAPI

[adamltyson]

This issue is to track the idea of better supporting users to link their own data with existing public resources. To access existing data we have:

• The BrainGlobe Atlas API to access brain atlas data
• morphapi to access neuronal morphology data:
  • Allen brain atlas - Cell Types
  • neuromorpho.org
  • Janelia Campus - Mouse Light project
  • Kunst et al 2019 - Zebrafish neurons
• brainrender can access gene expression data and connectivity streamlines from the Allen mouse brain atlas, but this is mostly for visualisation

Access to this data is a bit haphazard, and it's mostly focussed on anatomy. Many users have asked to be able to access additional data, including spatial transcriptomics.

My idea would be to build a "BrainGlobe DataAPI" to go alongside the "BrainGlobe AtlasAPI". This would be a (hopefully very thin) wrapped around existing community resources to allow users to access public datasets. This would allow users to answer questions such as:

• "Which brain regions are connected to this coordinate?"
• "What do cells in this brain region look like?"
• "What genes are expressed in this region"

This API should:

• Be consistent for different datatypes so that users don't have to relearn it for each type of data they want to inspect.
• Be easy to use both from a Python API and a GUI (brainrender-napari and maybe brainrender)
• Support data from as many species as possible
• Do as little as possible, relying on existing APIs as much as possible
• Ensure that credit is appropriately assigned (we shouldn't obfuscate the original source of the data)

One promising place to start to access lots of existing datasets is BrainTrawler (see #76)