OME — Open Microscopy Environment
Overview
The Open Microscopy Environment is a consortium of universities, research laboratories, industry partners, and developers producing open-source software and data format standards for biological microscopy. Founded in 2001, core development is led by the University of Dundee and German BioImaging. OME produces the standard file format family for microscopy data and the reference platform for institutional image data management.
Standards and Software Produced
- OME File Formats covers the OME format family: OME-TIFF is a metadata-rich TIFF for archival and publication, and OME-Zarr (OME-NGFF) is a cloud-native chunked format for large multidimensional datasets. OME-XML is the underlying metadata model embedded in OME-TIFF.
- Bio-Formats is a Java library reading 150+ proprietary microscopy formats (Zeiss .czi, Leica .lif, Nikon .nd2, and others) and converting them to OME-TIFF for interoperability.
- OMERO is a client-server platform for managing, visualising, and sharing microscopy images and metadata, deployed at Euro-BioImaging nodes and France BioImaging platforms.
- IDR (Image Data Resource) is a public reference image repository hosted at EMBL-EBI using OMERO, complementing the BioImage Archive.
Connections
- Produces: OME File Formats, OMERO, IDR