Warning
Draft - This documentation is under development. Advisory board listings are pending approval.
Open infrastructure for collaborative annotation of neuroscience stimuli
Transform isolated annotation efforts into cumulative scientific knowledge. Every lab annotating the same stimulus should contribute to a shared resource that grows richer over time.
Build open infrastructure that enables researchers to share, refine, and build upon stimulus annotations through GitHub-based collaboration, BIDS/HED standards compliance, and modern visualization tools.
Labs repeatedly annotate the same naturalistic stimuli in isolation:
- The same movies, images, and audio get re-annotated for each study
- Annotations remain siloed in supplementary materials or lab servers
- Incompatible formats confound meta-analyses
- Years of annotation work are lost when researchers move on
The Annotation Garden Initiative transforms this fragmentation into collaborative growth.
| Principle | Implementation |
|---|---|
| Branches as Layers | Different annotation perspectives (scenes, emotions, objects) live as Git branches that stack and merge |
| Standards-Based | Built on BIDS and HED specifications for machine-readable, interoperable annotations |
| AI-Accelerated | VLMs provide initial drafts; humans refine and validate |
| Cross-Modal | Compare annotations across modalities, populations, tasks, and environments |
| Dataset | Status | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Natural Scenes Dataset | Active | 73,000 COCO images from 7T fMRI study |
| Forrest Gump | Coming | 2-hour movie with rich temporal annotations |
| HBN Movies | Planned | Child Mind Institute developmental EEG collection |
This management repository contains governance and coordination documents for the AGI organization:
| Document | Purpose |
|---|---|
| White Paper | Technical vision and implementation roadmap |
| Vision | Comprehensive vision and design philosophy |
| Contributing | Guidelines for contributing to AGI |
| Governance | Decision-making and organizational structure |
| Repository | Purpose |
|---|---|
| image-annotation | VLM-powered annotation tool |
AGI builds on established neuroscience standards:
- BIDS: Brain Imaging Data Structure, particularly Stim-BIDS (BEP044)
- HED: Hierarchical Event Descriptors for semantic annotation vocabulary
- OpenNeuro: Integration with existing neuroimaging data archives
stimulus-name/
├── stimuli/ # Files or pointers
├── annotations/
│ ├── <annotation-type>/
│ │ ├── events.tsv
│ │ └── events.json
├── README.md
└── LICENSE
- Try the tool: annotation-garden.github.io/image-annotation
- Read the vision: White Paper | Vision Document
- Contribute: See our Contributing Guide
- Discuss: Open an issue in this repository
Phase 1 (Q4 2025 - Q1 2026): NSD static image annotations, core infrastructure Phase 2 (Q2 2026): Forrest Gump temporal annotations, continuous annotation tools Phase 3 (Q3-Q4 2026): HBN movies, federation protocols for copyright-protected stimuli
Cultivating knowledge together
annotation.garden