[ANN] Announcing GIFTI.jl for neuroimaging data

I’d like to belatedly announce a small package of mine, GIFTI.jl: A Julia package for working with gifti (.gii) neuroimaging surface files.

Unfortunately it’s not register-able in its current form due to naming conflicts, but it was designed to complement my other packages CIFTI.jl and ObservableCortex.jl – it was in fact supposed to become the surface-handling backend that would be the killer feature for ObservableCortex, my 3D brain surface visualization package driven by GLMakie.jl and Observables.jl, but the registration difficulties threw a wrench in that plan.

Anyway it’s a small and niche package, but for anyone out there in the Julia world trying to find something for handling GIFTI files, I hope this will fit the bill.

Note: To get around the package registration difficulties on this one, I was at one time playing around with the idea of making a package NiftiSpecs.jl that would unify handling of the whole trio of NIfTI-related file specifications: nifti, cifti, and gifti. But I think I’m probably never going to complete that, nor am I sure it was a very good idea, anyway. I no longer work in neuroimaging so I’m not going to continue down this path, however I hope someone out there may possibly find my work useful.

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You can post on the discord’s package registration channel to ger around the name conflict issue. It sounds like it might be worthwhile to also transfer all three packages to an org.

Do you mean the Slack #pgk-registration channel? If so: yes, but already the feed of registration PRs is being monitored, and most naming conflicts are false positives and are overridden even without prompting. The situation for GIFTI wasn’t as straightforward, and there were several rounds of discussions, the last of which in New package: GIFTI v0.1.0 by JuliaRegistrator · Pull Request #143439 · JuliaRegistries/General · GitHub

So GIFTI isn’t exactly “unregisterable”. It is a bit unfortunate that neither of the two avenues for registration came to a conclusion this time around.

Right now, with

it’s probably not a good time to follow up on this (assuming it means the package is “unmaintained” now). But if someone wants to take this up again in the future there are certainly possibilities.

Right, yes, into the JuliaNeuroscience org. But that has an unregistered GIFTI package that needs to be replaced with this one, so that we can then register it.

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Thanks to both of you. Yes, we thoroughly discussed the options around getting this registered and I particularly appreciated @goerz’s efforts in that regard, but it just didn’t work out to mutual agreement. I just wanted to give the package a little bit of visibility in case any future searchers for “GIFTI” in Julia should want to either to pick up my work here or make use of it in its current working-but-unregistered form.

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Sorry yes, i meant the slack channel.