An overview of online based platforms for sharing and analyzing electrophysiology data from big data perspective

With the development of applications and high‐throughput sensor technologies in medical fields, scientists and scientific professionals are facing a big challenge—how to manage and analyze the big electrophysiological datasets created by these sensor technologies. The challenge exhibits several aspects: one is the size of the data (which is usually more than terabytes); the second is the format used to store the data (the data created are generally stored using different formats); the third is that most of these unstructured, semi‐structured, or structured datasets are still distributed over many researchers' own local computers in their laboratories, which are not open access, to become isolated data islands. Thus, how to overcome the challenge and share/mine the scientific data has become an important research topic. The aim of this paper is to systematically review recent published research on the developed web‐based electrophysiological data platforms from the perspective of cloud computing and programming frameworks. Based on this review, we suggest that a conceptual scientific workflow‐based programming framework associated with an elastic cloud computing environment running big data tools (such as Hadoop and Spark) is a good choice for facilitating effective data mining and collaboration among scientists. WIREs Data Mining Knowl Discov 2017, 7:e1206. doi: 10.1002/widm.1206