[ome-devel] Re: open microscopy image formats

[Jason Swedlow]

Hi Vincent-

Thanks for the info.  I am passing this onto our developer list.      
Our major criteria for supported input file formats is what is  
written by the available image acquisition systems.  Many of these  
are commercial proprietary formats, so we have to use what they give  
us (and that support will hopefully get a good reworking).  We do  
write PNG from our Java client Shoola and this could be added to our  
web client.  We will definitely take a look at VOTable and compare  
notes.  Any other tips and suggestions you have are most welcome.

Cheers,

Jason

On 24 Aug 2005, at 11:15, Vincent McIntyre wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I just discovered this wonderful project. I have a question about
> the image formats you use - did you consider PNG?
> It went through a rough patch over the timeframe your project has
> been running, but it is not a bad format if you want to include
> metadata in the image header. And it's widely supported these days.
>
> I'm an astronomer and we use the FITS (http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/)
> format for almost all our imaging and other data taking needs.
> It's been designed to be transportable across computer architectures
> and to have a coordinate system applied to the pixel grid (in the
> microscopy case I guess this would be the image scale in micrometers
> per pixel).
>
> We are starting to outgrow FITS, and new specifications are appearing
> as part of the Virtual Observatory activity (http://www.ivoa.net).
> The main one at present is VOTable, an xml container similar to
> what OME is using. (http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/VOT.html)
>
> Well, I just thought I would mention these in case you had not
> bumped up against them yet. Good luck with OME.
>
> Kind regards
> Vincent McIntyre                                vmcintyr at atnf.csiro.au
> Australia Telescope National Facility, CSIRO     voice:+61-2-9372-4643
> PO Box 76, Epping, NSW 1710, AUSTRALIA             fax:+61-2-9372-4442
>


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