[ome-devel] OME Server lite...

[Jason Swedlow]

Mike-

Can I ask you to be a bit more explicit, along the lines of what Ilya 
requested.  Why? Well, we are hearing very similar requests from many 
quarters, both academic and commercial.  Regardless of what we in the 
project think, the burden of getting into OME seems too high to many 
people-- developer people, not just users.  These things  are always a 
trade-off: dealing with someone else's beast is always harder than 
dealing with your own, except that you have to write your own beast.  
But the AE is putting alot of people off, and that shouldn't happen.  
To the extent that our design contributes to this, it must be fixed.

So tell us specifically what you mean and about the problems you are 
having.  If this is simply that we have done a bad job of showing you 
the way, then we can fix that.  If, however, we have placed barriers to 
entry (which many people are saying), then we need to fix that.

Sorry-- am asking for a cogent, thoughtful email, a few days before 
everyone heads off for well-deserved rest.  This can wait til January.  
But note that we are beginning the process of redesigning our server, 
and one of the major requirements has to be ensuring that entry into 
the system is not only possible, but as easy as possible.

Cheers, and Happy New Year to all.

Jason

On 14 Dec 2004, at 21:41, Ilya Goldberg wrote:

> Hi Mike
> Good to hear from you.
>
> On Dec 13, 2004, at 2:33 PM, Wood, Mike wrote:
>
>> Hello everyone. It's been a long time since I've posted anything but 
>> I now have a few questions.
>>
>> Is it possible to extract from the OME project a simple database that 
>> uses the OME data model and can provide simple insert and query 
>> features using the OME XML data transport? In other words, how 
>> difficult would it be to remove components and create a simple data 
>> store?
>
> It seems that the current release of OME is what you're talking about: 
>  Its an image and meta-data store.  It has the analysis engine, but 
> you can just turn that stuff off so you don't have to look at it.
>
> Things are pretty compartmentalized so taking things apart is 
> definitely doable, but it really depends on what you have in mind 
> wether or not it would be "easy".
>
>> I'm am not interested in the analysis chains or the ability for the 
>> server to create images. I want a DB that can store images with 
>> metadata and allow me to query them both afterwards.
>
> Not sure what you mean by creating images - you mean like generating 
> thumbnails/jpegs/tiffs/etc?
> If you can't get a jpeg/tiff/thumbnail as a result of an image query, 
> you want to get back just the raw pixel data?
> That may or may not be a good thing depending on what you have in mind 
> for a client.
>
> I guess I'm not sure what you mean by "lite".  A lot of the complexity 
> (heaviness?) in OME is in dealing with the meta-meta-data required to 
> support an extensible data model.  If you want to keep this, then I 
> don't think there's a whole lot you can eliminate to lighten things 
> up.  If you want to have a fixed data model (support only OME XML 
> "core", let's say), then you  might be better off starting from 
> scratch and reusing only things like our XML parser and possibly 
> OMEIS.  If you eliminated everything having to do with analysis from 
> the code-base and the DB, it would eliminate a bunch of stuff, but not 
> as much as you might think.  Its the flexible data model that makes it 
> what it is (and enables analysis to boot).
>
> I think the best way to think about this though is in terms of the 
> functionality you want to see in the client.  Or maybe figuring out 
> what's undesirably "heavy" about what we have now.
>
> -Ilya
>
>
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Mike Wood
>> Applied Precision
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>>
>
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>

NOTE NEW EMAIL ADDRESS: jason at lifesci.dundee.ac.uk
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