A Digital Warehouse of Auditory Models and Data

EarLab contains extensive online, freely-accessable auditory databases as well as custom designed modeling and data analysis software tools. A fully functional online auditory modeling environment is also available, as well as downloadable models in several languages. EarLab also provides custom cross-platform software for creating your own distributed auditory modeling environment, as well as software for analyzing the results from experimentation. A database of auditory modules is available for online use or download for the distributed auditory modeling environment, as well as instructions and specifications for creating your own modules. All these databases and custom software tools can be used in a wide variety of hearing research applications.

The long range goal of the Virtual Hearing Laboratory is to improve understanding of the hearing process through improved collaboration between engineers, biologists and behavioral scientists.

Our strategy is to create a web-based resource that combines on-line computational models with a data warehouse containing a wide variety of auditory information with an innovative set of integrated computational tools for the manipulation and visualization of this data.

A major design objective of this endeavor is to create an environment that will enable researchers from all disciplines who work on hearing to share and compare their results electronically. The intent is not to duplicate existing methods for publishing scientific results, but rather to augment these methods by providing tools to compare published and unpublished data from different laboratories, species, and techniques as well as to provide a means to disseminate and integrate large data sets that can only be summarized in conventional publications.

A second major design objective is to fully integrate our auditory website with other bioinformatic resources on the world wide web. Examples of these resources include anatomical, bibliographic, genetic, molecular, and Human Brain Project web sites.