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Deprecate EventWaveform #580

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rly opened this issue Jul 23, 2024 · 0 comments · Fixed by #584
Closed

Deprecate EventWaveform #580

rly opened this issue Jul 23, 2024 · 0 comments · Fixed by #584
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category: proposal proposed enhancements or new features priority: medium non-critical problem and/or affecting only a small set of NWB users
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rly commented Jul 23, 2024

As discussed at the NWB meeting today. The EventWaveform neurodata type

https://github.com/NeurodataWithoutBorders/nwb-schema/blob/dev/core/nwb.ecephys.yaml#L191-L200

is a container that holds any number of SpikeEventSeries to "label"/"tag" a SpikeEventSeries as waveforms of detected events, e.g., threshold crossings of raw AP-band voltage data in extracellular electrophysiology, which are often computed during spike sorting. However, according to the doc for SpikeEventSeries, there is no other use for SpikeEventSeries and there does not seem to be a need to have more than 1 SpikeEventSeries organized in a group. EventWaveform is also not documented on PyNWB or MatNWB, and is not used on DANDI (probably in large part because it is not documented).

Perhaps EventWaveform would be useful if a user wants to store the results of setting multiple thresholds, but 1) it requires a lot of disk space to store this, 2) it is uncommon to use even a single SpikeEventSeries in the first place, 3) it is not so bad to have multiple SpikeEventSeries in an ecephys ProcessingModule with different names, and 4) since NWB 2.0, this organization of multiple SpikeEventSeries into a group has not been requested or used.

Overall, I think EventWaveform does not have a strong use case in modern usage, so to remove cruft and maintenance costs, I propose we deprecate EventWaveform.

@rly rly added category: proposal proposed enhancements or new features priority: medium non-critical problem and/or affecting only a small set of NWB users labels Jul 23, 2024
@rly rly self-assigned this Jul 23, 2024
@rly rly added this to the 2.9.0 milestone Jul 23, 2024
@rly rly mentioned this issue Jul 23, 2024
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@rly rly closed this as completed in #584 Oct 1, 2024
@rly rly modified the milestones: 2.9.0, 2.8.0 Oct 1, 2024
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