[1] It is the lexical part of the NIF knowledge base, and NeuroLex is intended to make literature review easier and ensure consistent terminology and usage across researchers for the topics of experimental, clinical, and transnational neuroscience, and for genetic and genomic resources.

The Framework is an inventory of neuroscience databases, annotated and integrated with a unified system of biomedical terminology (i.e., NeuroLex).

To make this search more effective, the NIF is constructing ontologies to help organize neuroscience concepts into category hierarchies, e.g. stating that a neuron is a cell.

The initial entries in NeuroLex were built from the NIFSTD ontologies, which subsumed an earlier vocabulary, BIRNLex.

It currently contains concepts that span gross anatomy, cells of the nervous system, subcellular structures, diseases, functions, and techniques.