Future Development

2009

With the release of OMERO Beta 4.0, the OME project has now released a full range of tools for visualization and management of biological image data. We have completed our migration from JBOSS, in favor of the remoting services provided by ICE from ZeroC. We have also (finally!) supported data deletion in OMERO clients. We've released a new OMERO client-- OMERO.web -- a web browser-based client that is represents our first steps towards supporting data sharing and collaboration.

Overall, our major goal for 2009 is the delivery of complete solutions, where we provide full integration with existing, well established image analysis platforms. We are building interfaces to support a variety of image analysis environments and leveraging our development to provide real opportunities for scientific collaboration.

As we move forward in 2009, we are planning the following:

• We will add support for more external analysis tools, upgrading our support for ImageJ and Matlab within the OMERO Platform.
• We will complete our support for ROIs, using established definition and storage standards from OpenGIS, to enable storage and support of ROIs within OMERO.server, and improving our use of ROIs for measurement within OMERO.insight.
• We will extend the functionality present in OMERO.fs, to make our image repositories as flexible to use as possible.
• We will update our image rendering tools to support very large images, to ensure OMERO can be used in applications that use tiling.
• We will extend our experimental metadata support, providing more sophisticated queries of protocol objects, and better integration with the rest of the OMERO Platform.
• We will extend the functionality in OMERO.web, to build on functionality that enables sharing of data between collaborating scientists. Ultimately, we want to enable “publishing”, where defined datasets can be made publicly available via a defined URL.

During our testing of Beta4 with a range of users, we’ve been looking for gaps in OMERO’s functionality—where OMERO fails to enable a complete workflow from a microscope file to final published result. As always, we don’t see OMERO itself providing all necessary functionality, but we want to ensure that each necessary step is either provided by OMERO or an another software tool that links to it. With Beta4 released, we will start identifying specific experimental workflows that we will target for “complete support”, either within OMERO, or with applications that link to OMERO.

As always, our server and client roadmaps are available. We welcome queries and comments. Get involved!