[ome-devel] Existing client side code in C

[Ilya Goldberg]

On Aug 3, 2004, at 8:57 AM, Joshua Moore wrote:

> Two quick questions:
>
> (1) Are there client-side C bindings of the omeis methods available in 
> CVS?
>
> (2) What is the availability of time information in the pixel struct? 
> I.e. if a user needs to calculate DX/DT over two images or 
> "timeElapsed=T*DT + startTime", is this available somewhere?

The context of your question maybe implies that you're considering 
using omeis for acquisition, which is great and fabulous.
So, in that sense, maybe omeis should store timing information for each 
plane as it comes in.  Currently it does not.
Is this what you had in mind?

The concept behind omeis is that it deals only with pixels, and time is 
a piece of meta-data.  So the proper way to do this is to tell omeis 
about the pixels, and tell OME about the time.  If we included time in 
omeis (which we could certainly do, and it wouldn't be that hard) then 
where do we stop?  Surely you want to store what filter you used for a 
given channel and what the objective was, and all sorts of other 
things.  OME is really the place for all that stuff.
Since we have java-based import of proprietary files that contain 
meta-data besides the pixels, this could be used as a basis for doing 
this sort of thing in C.
If you're talking about having a dumb piece of acquisition hardware 
talk to OME, then probably the easiest thing to do is to pre-form 
chunks of XML that has place-holders for your meta-data, then 
substitute the place-holders with real values at acquisition time.  
Then you just import the XML using the regular mechanism.  In this 
case, you can have the hardware deposit the pixels into omeis directly, 
and use an omeis reference in the XML you send to OME.  This gives you 
the best of both worlds:  a pixel-centric interface for your data and a 
meta-data-centric interface for your meta-data.  Its a bit of a 
convolution for a piece of acquisition hardware that only produces a 
fixed set of meta-data, but its easy enough to accomplish by just 
treating the XML you need around it as pre-set fluff.  Or you can put 
the meta-data in the binary form of your convenience, and write a 
back-end importer for it.

If you're trying to do something with proprietary files, back-end 
importers are really the preferred way to deal with them assuming there 
is enough information in the files to unambiguously populate the 5-D 
pixel array and any meta-data you want stored with the images.

Sorry if I've completely misunderstood what you were intending to do.

-Ilya


>
> -Josh.
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