Data Formats

Public datasets for EEG-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) keep multiplying, but electrode layouts, task definitions, preprocessing and participant records differ from study to study, making the data hard to reuse across datasets and the results hard to replicate. This review screened 16,920 records down to 129 publications, mapped the fragmentation across structural, semantic, procedural, human/contextual and computational layers, and scored reporting transparency against 10 criteria, with a median score of 9. Data availability was stated in 61.2% of the papers; code or pipeline availability in just 20.9%. Existing standards, ontologies, software platforms and transfer-learning methods each solve part of the problem, the authors conclude, but none yet delivers full semantic interoperability.