[ome-users] OMERO to OMERO communications?

[Josh Moore]

On Oct 7, 2013, at 5:29 PM, John Webber (NBI) wrote:

> Hi all,

Hi John,

> I am currently looking to implement some form of OMERO to OMERO communication, for sharing data between different Omero instances / servers.  I am specifically looking for a mechanism by which selected Omero images (not all) within one Omero server, could be made available to the database in a second Omero server.

Solely for viewing? Also for annotating, etc? What are the data sizes you're looking to "mirror"/"federate"/"share"? What are the driving forces for multiple servers as opposed to multiple groups?


> Does anyone have any pointers as to the best method that this can be achieved?


Options requiring little or no new development:

 * The current best-practice would be to export an OME-TIFF of each image and import it into the second system.

 * With images newly imported in OMERO5, you would be able to export the original files rather than just an OME-TIFF.


Other options:

 * A further possibility would be to point two OMERO5 servers at the same physical location. This would likely fall under "In place imports" recently discussed on the mailing list[1]

 * More invasive but still possible would be a mechanism that would pull the bytes from some other location. For example, a "RemotePixelBuffer" similar to "BfPixelBuffer" [2]. We've begun thinking about a solution like this, but it would undoubtedly be a good deal of work.


> Thanks
> John

Cheers,
~Josh


[1] http://lists.openmicroscopy.org.uk/pipermail/ome-devel/2013-September/002523.html
[2] https://github.com/openmicroscopy/openmicroscopy/blob/develop/components/romio/src/ome/io/bioformats/BfPixelBuffer.java