nwbview is a software to display the contents of the binary NWB file format. It is written in Rust for high-performance, memory safety and ease of deployment.
Neurodata Without Borders (NWB) is a standard data format to represent neurophysiology data files. It enables interoperability between neurophysiology data produced by different neuroscience labs. Examples of the data stored in .NWB format range from patch clamp experiments to optical physiology experiments.
The underlying storage technology used by the NWB format is the binary HDF format. While storing the files as binary brings advantages on the read/write speed as well as the file size, it stores the data in a way that is not readable by humans. I.e. one cannot open the file in a text editor to see the contents, thus there is need for a viewer.
nwbview uses the egui Rust GUI library for rendering.
The Rust library dependencies are provided in the cargo.toml file.
Note that the Rust libraries depend on the following system packages that need to be provided.
libgtk-3-devlibrust-atk-devlibhdf5-serial-devOnce all the dependencies are satisfied, go to the directory containing cargo.toml and run the following command.
shell
cargo build
Once again go to the directory containing the cargo.toml file and simply run the following command.
shell
cargo run --release
The release flag builds the artifacts with optimizations. Do not specify it when you need to debug.
All contributions are welcome and very much appreciated :)
We use Github's issue tracker, pull requests and the discussion interfaces for the contributions.
The pull requests require the approval from a maintainer as well as the CI checks.