Neuroshare Glossary

This is an explantation of the most commonly used terms in Neuroshare functions.

Generic descriptions:

Entities – An entity typically represents either a single data channel (e.g. an electrode) or a set of entries of a basic data type (e.g. comments) (event, analog, segment, and neural event).

Index – A data entry for a particular entity.

Library – A dynamic-link library (DLL) used to define the import functions for a specific data file type.

ns_ – Typical prefix for Neuroshare functions.

Specific descriptions:

Event Entities – Discrete events that consists of small time-stamped text or binary data (e.g. trial markers, experimental events, digital input values, and embedded user comments).

Event Entity Index - Refers to a timestamp and data combination.

Analog Entities – Continuously sampled data that represent digitized analog signals such as position, force, and other experiment signals, as well as electrode signals such as EKG, EEG and extracellular microelectrode recordings. Analog Entities may also contain gaps in time from data files that do not record data between experimental trials.

Analog Entity Index – Refers to a specific digitized sample. Note - The time interval between successive samples is not always the sampling period as there may be gaps in the acquisition of the data.

Segment Entities – Short, time-stamped segments of digitized analog signals in which the segments are separated by variable amounts of time. Segment Entities can contain data from more than one source. They are intended to represent discontinuous analog signals such as extracellular spike waveforms from electrodes or groups of electrodes.

Segment Entity Index – A short, time-stamped segment of analog data from one or more sources.

Neural Event Entities – Timestamps of event and segment entities that are known to represent neural action potential firing times. For example, if a segment entity contains sorted neural spike waveforms, each sorted unit is also exported as a neural entity. If an event entity is known by the library to only contain neuron firing times, it should be exported as a neural event entity instead of an event entity.

Neural Event Entity Index – A series of timestamps indicating neural event. Each neural event entity contains event times for a single neural source.