NeuroInspector: A Local-First Environment for Inspecting and Annotating Hierarchical Neuroscience Datasets

Abstract

The growing scale and structural complexity of neuroscience datasets have made dataset inspection an increasingly distinct stage of the research workflow. Existing inspection workflows, however, remain fragmented, often relying on exploratory scripts, manual documentation, and repeated navigation of unfamiliar file structures before meaningful scientific analysis can begin. Here we present NeuroInspector, a lightweight, browser-based environment for inspecting HDF5 and NWB files. Using WebAssembly-based HDF5 parsing (h5wasm), NeuroInspector runs entirely client-side: files are opened directly from local disk, and the application implements no file-upload endpoint, including in its hosted deployment. The tool combines structural navigation, metadata inspection, sampled data previews, and path-level annotation into portable, fingerprinted "project packs" that preserve inspection decisions without modifying the original file. Rather than functioning as an analysis or validation platform, NeuroInspector provides a dedicated, traceable environment for the inspection stage that precedes formal analysis.