Fig. 1

The principle for data standardization in a typical electrophysiological experiment. The experiment normally runs in a trial-by-trial manner, so the data collected must include the experimental settings defining the conditions in each trial and the behavioral and neuronal responses. These data can be divided into Event, Comment, Spike and Analog entities. The Event entity represents the occurrence of specific events, such as a stimulus is turned on or a button is pressed (green bar in the top panel). The Comment entity contains information that defines the experimental settings, such as the orientation of the stimulus in each trial (blue bar in the top panel). The Spike entity records the action potentials (middle panel), and the Analog entity records analog signals including local field potential (bottom panel). For a given data set, we convert the data into these four entities regardless of their original format and save in a standardized format for future use. The right side shows how these entities are organized in the output file