Synapse is a collaborative informatics platform dedicated to supporting large-scale pooling of data, knowledge, and expertise across institutional boundaries to solve research problems. Synapse helps scientists solve a series of problems:

• Finding and using relevant data - It can be difficult for scientists to find and access data and resources generated by others, even within the confines of the same organization. Synapse provides a central registry for scientific data and results, in which data can be annotated and queried even while components of a study resides in different systems.

• Understanding analysis workflows - Synapse is built with the understanding that most analytical research is experimental and ad hoc in nature, with hardened analysis methods only emerging over time. Tracking who has run what version of code on what version of the data immediately helps projects run more smoothly, and ultimately enables reproducible workflows that allow others to build off of prior work.

• Supporting genome-scale analysis - Analyzing whole genome datasets is currently limited to those with access to large computational resources and significant IT support. Synapse facilitates a computational model where code and users can move to the data, wherever it is stored.

• Forming and maintaining productive collaborations - Most scientists tend to start a research effort from scratch rather than elaborate on work in an unknown state. Synapse helps scientists track what work has already been done in a particular area and create and sustain active collaborations in which research results are published online as they are generated.

Synapse allows researchers to share and describe data, analyses, and other content. Data and analyses can be stored in many types of locations, including private servers, local hard drives, or cloud storage. Synapse provides a common interface to describe these data or analyses, where they come from, and how to use them. Synapse also provides mechanisms for adding and retrieving data, analyses, and their respective descriptions. For a comprehensive introduction to Synapse see our Getting Started guide.