[ome-devel] Plan for transferring data from one OMERO to another

[Eilidh Troup]

Hi,

I’m a software engineer working on data management in biology. Our use case is that lab groups have their own instances of OMERO, and there is also a centrally-hosted university OMERO server which they would like to transfer data to. I’m planning to write a script to allow users to transfer data from one OMERO to another. I wanted to run the plans by this forum to see what you thought of the idea, and whether my planned implementation seems sensible.

I plan to write a script (OMERO.scripts) to run on the local instances of OMERO and be used through OMERO.server or OMERO.web. This will let the user choose the image, dataset or project that they want to move, and enter their credentials for the central OMERO server. Then the script will use the Blitz Gateway to read data from the local server, and then to write to the remote server. 

issues: 

- How will users choose where to put data? It will have to be either in a default project on the central server, or the script would have to be interactive, where the user enters their credentials, and then the central server is contacted so that a list of projects and datasets belonging to that user can be presented.

- There will be a graph of objects linked to any given one, for example, a dataset with images, tags and attachments. Need to traverse this to transfer all associated data.

- Some IDs will need to be mapped from one OMERO to the other, for example tags - shouldn’t create a new one, but link to existing tag with same name on the other OMERO.

I’m planning to write the code in Python and use OMERO.scripts and the Blitz Gateway. Please let me know what you think.
-- 
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.