October: Geppetto month

Here is a recap of Geppetto Month at the OpenWorm Foundation. This content has been cross-posted from the OpenWorm Foundation blog (h/t Giovanni Idili).

 

OpenWorm is made up of many sub-projects, “project of the month” is an effort to highlight a different OpenWom sub-project every month. This month is Geppetto’s turn!

What is Geppetto?
Geppetto is a visualisation and simulation web-based platform for building neuroscience applications. The first use case ever of Geppetto was OpenWorm itself (some lore: the virtual Worm being Pinocchio, a Geppetto was needed to “make it”), but since then many groups have adopted it as their platform of choice. It is basically a set of reusable components for simulation, visualisation and data aggregation that make it easier to develop your neuroscience application, be it a data portal or an entry point to external simulation engines.

Projects that currently make use of Geppetto as a platform:
OpenWorm uses Geppetto as an integration platform for the output of various of its subprojects, from connectome browsing to replaying of integrated electrophysiology and fluid dynamics simulations.

Open Source Brain uses Geppetto to share, visualize and simulate neuronal models, both for individual neurons and networks.

Virtual Fly Brain is an ontology and 3D/2D  morphology browser for drosophila resources built using Geppetto.

NetPyNE-ui is a user friendly UI to create and run neuronal models using the NetPyNE library.

Open Development
Geppetto development is entirely open source, like anything else that happens under the OpenWorm umbrella. There are open sprint meetings every two weeks that anybody can join, and we keep a public development board showing development activities and progress. You can browse the issues and see if there is anything you might wanna chance your hand on!

Resources
Here are some links if you want to learn more about Geppetto:

          Open access paper (Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society B, 2018)

          Geppetto docs

          Geppetto live demo

          Development board

          Geppetto source code (Github)

          Geppetto Blog

          Geppetto on Twitter

Get involved!
Getting involved is easy, simply fill out the OpenWorm volunteer application form and we will invite you to the OpenWorm foundation slack, from there you can interact with the community and join the #geppetto channel if you are interested to learn more about Geppetto or get involved as a contributor.