While our products provide a wide variety of analyses that can be applied to tracing data, many groups have needed to perform specific analyses that we haven’t yet included in our products. These groups often write custom software or scripts that operate on the tracing data, and they need some way of retrieving the raw tracing data (i.e. the exact coordinates of the points that make up a tracing) from their data files.
So, we often receive the question: “How can I export all of my tracing data so that I can analyze it elsewhere?”
The best way to do this is to save your data file as an XML file - all of our products allow the user to save an XML file from the File -> Save As -> Data File option. The XML format is a plain-text format, which means that it can be opened and read in any text editor (e.g. Microsoft Word, Notepad). All of the data is recorded in a human-readable form, so it’s easy to skim through the file to see what data it has.
For users that want to write a custom script for analysis, you can refer to the Neuromorphological File Specification that we recently published. It gives a full description of how we organize tracing data into an XML file, which makes it easier for a programmer to know what to expect from our data. You can read more about it in the topic for the Neuromorphological File Specification.