foundingGIDE at

2024 OME Community Meeting

The Open Microscopy Environment (OME) is a consortium of universities, research labs, industry partners, and developers producing format standards for microscopy and open-source data software such as OMERO and Bio-Formats.

From May 29-31, the 2024 OME Community Meeting was held in person in Dundee, UK. The foundingGIDE project represented by partners from Europe (EMBL-EBI, German Bioimaging) and Japan (RIKEN) attended and contributed to the conference on topics related to image metadata, next-generation file formats and data repositories. 

foundingGIDE aims to establish the basis of a coordinated Global Image Data Ecosystem by developing common recommendations for ontologies and metadata. This effort is in collaboration with the wider global bioimage data community, with the key objective of increasing image data resources interoperability. OME’s contributions to metadata standards and data interoperability are crucial for the success of initiatives like foundingGIDE to reach the common goal of enhancing bioimaging infrastructure.

The dynamic innovation in imaging results in hundreds of proprietary file formats, posing a challenge for the interoperability of imaging data in the drive to make scientific data FAIR (Moore, J., Allan, C., Besson, S. et al.). To address the challenge of increasing complexity, size, and diversity of imaging data, OME has developed next-generation file formats (OME-NGFF), and the topic was frequently discussed at the meeting. As a result, an idea – the OME 2024 NGFF Challenge – emerged to attempt converting a significant volume of existing bioimaging data into the next major version of OME-Zarr based on Zarr v3.

To keep up with OME 2024 NGFF Challenge check the updates on image.sc. The outcome of the OME 2024 NGFF Challenge will be presented on 29th of October at the Global BioImaging Exchange of Experience which is soon followed by foundingGIDE Community Event.