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 be contributing 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
- Inconsistencies between annotation efforts 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 |
|---|---|---|
| NSD | 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 |
| Repository | Purpose |
|---|---|
| management | Governance, white papers, coordination |
| image-annotation | VLM-powered annotation tool |
- Try the tool: annotation-garden.github.io/image-annotation
- Read the vision: White Paper
- Contribute: See our Contributing Guide
- Discuss: Open an issue in the management repo
Built on BIDS and HED specifications, with integration to OpenNeuro.
Cultivating knowledge together
annotation.garden
