Documentation summary

HED publications

Journal articles

Introducing the HED SCORE library schema for annotation of EEG in clinical: settings:

Hermes, D., Pal Attia, T., Beniczky, S. et al. (2025).
Hierarchical Event Descriptor library schema for EEG data annotation.
Scientific Data volume 12, Article number 1448 (2025).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-05791-2.

Introducing the HED Lang library schema for annotation of linguistic stimulations:

Denissen, M., Pöll, B., Robbins, K. Makeig, S. and Hutzler, F. (2024).
HED LANG –A Hierarchical Event Descriptors library extension for annotation of language cognition experiments.
Scientific Data volume 11, Article number: 1428 (2024)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-024-04282-0#:~:text=The%20HED%20LANG%20extension%20will,readily%20reused%20for%20further%20analysis..

Practical use of HED SCORE:

Dan, J., Pale, U. Amirshahi, A., Capelletti, W. Ingolfsson, T., Wang, X., Cossettini, A., Bernini, A. Benini, L., Beniczky, S., Atienza, D., and P. Ryvlin (2024).
SzCORE: Seizure Community Open-Source Research Evaluation framework for the validation
of electroencephalography-based automated seizure detection algorithms
Epilepsia, Sept 18, 2024.
https://doi.org/10.1111/epi.18113.

Conceptual framework for HED and path for future development:

Makeig, S. and K. Robbins (2024).
Events in context—The HED framework for the study of brain, experience and behavior.
Front. Neuroinform. Vol. 18 Research Topic 15 Years of impact, open neuroscience.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fninf.2024.1292667.

Explanation of the history, development, and motivation for third generation HED:

Robbins, K., Truong, D., Jones, A., Callanan, I., and S. Makeig (2022).
Building FAIR functionality: Annotating events in time series data using Hierarchical Event Descriptors (HED).
Neuroinformatics Special Issue Building the NeuroCommons. Neuroinformatics https://doi.org/10.1007/s12021-021-09537-4. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12021-021-09537-4.

Detailed case study in using HED for tagging:

Robbins, K., Truong, D., Appelhoff, S., Delorme, A., and S. Makeig (2021).
Capturing the nature of events and event context using Hierarchical Event Descriptors (HED).
NeuroImage Special Issue Practice in MEEG. NeuroImage 245 (2021) 118766.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811921010387.

Preprints

Development of the HED SCORE library schema for clinical annotation of EEG:

D. Hermes, Pal Attia, T., Beniczky, S., Bosch-Bayard, J., Delorme, A., Lundstrom, B., Rogers, C., Rampp, S.,
Shirazi, S., Truong, D., Valdes-Sosa, P., Worrell, G., Makeig, S., and Robbins, K. (2024).
Hierarchical Event Descriptor library schema for EEG data annotation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.15173.
DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2310.15173.

Book chapters

Truong, D., Robbins, K., Delorme, A., and S. Makeig (2025).
End-to-end processing of M/EEG data with BIDS, HED, and EEGLAB. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-4260-3_6.
in Methods for analyzing large neuroimaging datasets edited by Whelan and Lemaitre.

Denissen, D., Richlan, F., Birklbauer, J., Pawlik, M., Ravenschlag, A., Himmelstoss, N., Hutzler, F. and K. Robbins (in press).
Actionable event annotation and analysis in fMRI: A practical guide to event handling.
https://link.springer.com/protocol/10.1007/978-1-0716-4260-3_7.
in Methods for analyzing large neuroimaging datasets edited by Whelan and Lemaitre.

HED schema viewer

The HED schema is usually developed in .mediawiki format and converted to XML for use by tools. However, researchers wishing to tag datasets will find both of these views hard to read. All versions of the standard schema and library schemas including the prerelease versions available via the expandable HTML viewer. The .mediawiki sources can be viewed on the **hed-schemas GitHub repository using GitHub’s default markdown viewer.

HED Websites

The following is a summary of the HED-related websites:

Description

Site

HED project homepage

https://www.hedtags.org

HED resources (docs)

https://www.hedtags.org/hed-resources

HED Wikipedia Page

https://https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_Event_Descriptors

HED specification

https://www.hedtags.org/hed-specification

CTagger executable jar

https://github.com/hed-standard/CTagger/raw/main/CTagger.jar

Repositories

HED organization

https://github.com/hed-standard

HED specification

https://github.com/hed-standard/hed-specification

HED examples and datasets

https://github.com/hed-standard/hed-examples

HED Python tools

https://github.com/hed-standard/hed-python

HED Javascript code

https://github.com/hed-standard/hed-javascript

HED Matlab code and EEGLAB support

https://github.com/hed-standard/hed-matlab

HED web deployment

https://github.com/hed-standard/hed-web

CTagger resources

https://github.com/hed-standard/CTagger

Online tools

HED tools

https://hedtools.org/hed

HED tools (development)

https://hedtools.org/hed_dev

Browser-based validation

https://www.hedtags.org/hed-javascript/

HED working documents

HED was approved as an INCF standard in December of 2024:

Mapping of HED terms and their descriptions to known ontologies is:

Two other working documents hold HED concepts under development: