Data standard

NIfTI

Neuroimaging Informatics Technology Initiative format

The standard file format for volumetric neuroimaging data. A fixed binary header (NIfTI-1, or NIfTI-2 for large dimensions) carries voxel-to-world affines (qform/sform), units, intent codes and extensions, followed by the image array. Defined by the NIfTI Data Format Working Group; CIFTI-2 builds on NIfTI-2 for grayordinate data.

MRIPETfile formatvolumetric images
E23

FAIR 13/48

Version v3.0.0

Evaluated 27 Oct 2026

How scores work

Source & access

Homepagenifti.nimh.nih.gov Repositorygithub.com

Schemas & modules 2

  • nifti1.hNormative NIfTI-1 header definition
  • nifti2.hNIfTI-2 header definition (64-bit dimensions)

Automated evaluation

F Findable FAIR0/12
  • Persistent identifier (F1)no PURL / w3id / DOI for the artefact0
  • Indexed in services (F4)not indexed anywhere0
  • Citable reference (F2)no reference publication listed0
A Accessible FAIR6/12
  • Homepage reachableHTTP 200+3
  • Artefact retrievable over HTTP(S) (A1)only the source repository is reachable (no direct download)+3
  • Metadata persists in a registry (A2)not in Bioregistry or OBO Foundry0
I Interoperable FAIR0/12
  • Formal machine-readable format (I1)none of: NIfTI-1, NIfTI-20
  • Semantic-web IRIs (I2)no RDF/OWL/JSON-LD representation0
  • References other vocabularies (I3)no imported vocabularies found0
R Reusable FAIR7/12
  • Clear license (R1.1)Public domain+5
  • Release provenance (R1.2)v3.0.0 (latest GitHub release); not declared inside the artefact+2
  • Community standards (R1.3)no independent compliance report (not on the OBO Dashboard)0
Q Ontology consistency & qualityn/a
  • Not applicabledata-standard without an OWL/OBO/RDF artefact; total scaled from 80 to 1000
M Maintenance2/16
  • Recency2024-12-20 → 22.2 months (≤ 2 years)+2
  • Release cadence (12 months)0 releases (GitHub releases)0
U Community adoption6/16
  • Documented adopting projects3 projects+4
  • Reused by other ontologies00
  • Community signalmax(stars 49 → 2, citations 0 → 0)+2
P Penalties (inactivity & inconsistency)-3
  • Time since last activity1.9 years → 4 × max(0, 1.9 − 1)-3
  • Inactive statusnot archived, legacy or inactive0

FAIR subtotal 13/48 · earned 21/80 → scaled 26 − 3 inactivity = 23/100 → grade E

Community adoption 3

  • BIDS

    Imaging data SHOULD be stored as NIfTI

    Curated by SchemaScope
  • AFNI

    Bundles the NIfTI C library; reads and writes NIfTI natively

    Curated by SchemaScope
  • SPM

    @nifti class for NIfTI input and output

    Curated by SchemaScope

Know a project that uses NIfTI? Suggest it.

Tooling

History & changes 1 run

History starts with the first archived run; changes appear after the next evaluation.

RunScoreFAIRVersion evaluatedTermsSnapshot
27 Oct 2026, 21:58 UTC23 E13v3.0.0—JSON

Provenance

Every fact on this page was fetched automatically. Each row shows where it came from and when. If a source fails, the last good value is kept and marked “carried forward”.

FactSourceRetrieved
Homepage link check (HTTP 200)nifti.nimh.nih.gov27 Oct 2026, 21:58 UTC
Repository link check (HTTP 200)github.com27 Oct 2026, 21:58 UTC
Git refs (commit 8f72d11, latest tag last_spm5_version)github.com27 Oct 2026, 21:58 UTC
GitHub repository statisticsapi.github.com27 Oct 2026, 21:58 UTC

Run 2026-10-27T21-58-30Z · evaluator v2.0.0 · rubric v3.5 · entry.json · run snapshot