The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is a standard specifying the description of neuroimaging data in a filesystem hierarchy and of the metadata associated with the imaging data. Membership on the BIDS Steering Group is through elections by BIDS Contributors, and BIDS Steering Group terms are 3 years.
The goal of BIDS is to make neuroimaging data more accessible, shareable, and usable by researchers. To achieve this goal, BIDS seeks to develop a simple and intuitive way to organize and describe neuroimaging and associated data. BIDS has three foundational principles:
- To minimize complexity and facilitate adoption, reuse existing methods and technologies whenever possible.
- Tackle 80% of the most commonly used neuroimaging data, derivatives, and models (inspired by the pareto principle).
- Adoption by the global neuroimaging community and their input during the creation of the specification is critical for the success of the project.