Dear All-
Many of you know OME has been working on new technology, codenamed OME-5. This includes updates to Bio-Formats and OMERO that improve direct access to original proprietary file formats.
For Bio-Formats, this means much improved performance for accessing complex data sets as seen in HCS and digital pathology, and also several microscopy formats.
For OMERO, this means that data import is a straight copy of the original file format, and that OMERO (via Bio-Formats) uses the proprietary file as a data source. Users can access these files from the OMERO repository using 3rd party software, removing the need to keep a copy of these data outside of OMERO. Digital pathology data is MUCH faster and the HCS import workflow is substantially improved.
We first released OME-5 technology in June 2013, as 5.0.0-Beta1. For us, the “Beta” terminology meant two things:
* upgrading from an OMERO-4.4.x system to OMERO-5.0 wasn’t possible
* there were several pending updates to the OMERO and Bio-Formats APIs to support new multi-dimensional data types, such as FLIM, OPT and LSM/SPIM.
Most people think of software labelled “beta” as “new”, or “partially tested”. We’ve been running OMERO 5.0.0 in several production systems since June 2013, and have a sense of its behavior and performance. We’ve been bugfixing since its release and believe the software is ready to move towards production. This fall, we’ve worked hard on supporting the 4.4.x → 5.0 upgrade. We’ve tested this upgrade on several systems, including a 13 TB production OMERO system we run here at Dundee. We’re happy to say that, just in time for the winter break, we’ll be releasing the next version of OME-5, and this version will support these 4.4.x → 5.0 upgrades.
We’ve debated long and hard about the naming scheme for this, and other upcoming releases. Several people have asked when OME-5 will “leave” Beta status, as some institutions have a policy of banning the installation of software labelled “Beta”. In the end, we’ve decided to remove “Beta”, and move towards a full release. We’ve tested 5.0 more than any other version of software we’ve ever released. Therefore, we’ll release a 5.0.0-RC1 this week, and plan to move to a full release, for production use, in Jan 2014. This will allow many people who want to use OME-5 technology to upgrade, without substantially affecting their use of the Bio-Formats and OMERO APIs.
During Q1 (or early Q2) 2014, we aim to release OME-5.1. This version WILL have several updates to the API, to support many new imaging modalities. We’ll do our best to announce these changes early, and provide as much documentation and information as possible.
Finally, our plan is to release one more update to the OME 4.4, version 4.4.10, again in Jan 2014. This includes several bug fixes. We’ll continue to support 4.4.10 through 2014, for those of you who wish to stay on this platform, but will perform no further substantial functional additions to this version.
Questions and comments welcome. As always, thanks for your support, and best wishes for a happy, safe, and restful holiday to all.
- The OME Team
