NWB

NWB is an acronym that can refer to several things. The most widely used in scientific contexts is Neurodata Without Borders, a data standard for neurophysiology.

Neurodata Without Borders provides a common data model and file format to store neural recordings, behavioral data, stimuli, and metadata. NWB:N 2.0 uses a hierarchical data structure built on HDF5 and defines core data types such as TimeSeries, ElectricalSeries, ImageSeries, and DynamicTable, as well as groups for Acquisition, Processing, and General metadata. It supports detailed provenance and experimental metadata, including subject information, equipment, and experimental conditions. Software libraries such as PyNWB (Python) and MatNWB (MATLAB) read and write NWB files and enable validation against the NWB schema.

The aim is interoperability, reproducibility, and data sharing across labs and studies. By providing a stable, extensible format, NWB facilitates data exchange and large-scale analyses. The ecosystem includes community-driven extensions to handle modality-specific data and specialized metadata, and ongoing governance to update the schema.

In other contexts, NWB may refer to organizations or products that use the same acronym. No single alternative meaning dominates outside neuroscience, so clarification by field or organization is helpful.