Digital atlases as a framework for data sharing

Digital brain atlases are useful as references, analytical tools, and as a data integration framework. As a result, they and their supporting tools are being recognized as potentially useful resources in the movement toward data sharing. Several projects are connecting infrastructure to these tools which facilitate sharing, managing, and retrieving data of different types, scale, and even location. With these in place, we have the ability to combine, analyze, and interpret these data in a manner not previously possible, opening the door to examine issues in new and exciting ways, and potentially leading to speedier discovery of answers as well as new questions about the brain. Here we discuss recent efforts in the use of digital mouse atlases for data sharing.