History

Dimitri Yatsenko created the first working version of DataJoint for MATLAB in October 2009 during his graduate studies in Andreas Tolias' lab at Baylor College of Medicine to manage large volumes of data emerging from his regular experiments.

Emmanouil Froudarakis and Jacob Reimer became early adopters in the lab. By 2011, DataJoint had been adopted by the entire lab and had crossed over to other labs.

In the early years, Alex Ecker (Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics) and Andreas Hoenselaar (CalTech) contributed substantially to ongoing development.

Although Dimitri started a Python implementation early on, its functionality remained limited until Edgar Y. Walker and Fabian Sinz joined the effort in 2014 and 2015, respectively. By early 2016, the Python implementation had matched and, in some respects, surpassed the capabilities of the MATLAB counterpart. Currently, our data pipelines seamlessly combine \matlab nodes and Python nodes.

Several other neuroscience labs have adopted DataJoint as their principal data organization and processing tool. Some publications making use of DataJoint are listed at http://datajoint.github.io/publications.

When Andreas Tolias' lab joined the IARPA-sponsored MICrONS project (http://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/research-programs/microns) in January 2016, DataJoint became the principal tool for organizing data for ongoing processing and concurrent access across many institutions with data hosting and processing moving from lab-based servers to cloud hosting and processing.