[ome-devel] Who's who in Pixels? (iRODS ideas...)

[Harri Jäälinoja]

Hi again,

> Since often it's not just the data that users want to collaborate on, but also the annotations and other metadata associated with it, the views would disconnected if the same data lived in multiple OMERO instances. But iRODs would certainly be an option for sharing the binary data between sites.
>

ok, I think I understand. There is also a metadata system in iRODS, so 
in principle it would be possible to send the images with annotations 
and everything included, but then you would exactly end up with the same 
data and the same annotations at two OMERO sites, so there would be 
confusion about which one to update.

Hmm, maybe in this scenario it would anyway be useful to add an iRODS 
metadata field to the data set, to tell which OMERO server has the 
metadata for it. So when you register a data set from a collaborator at 
your OMERO site, the steps would be:

DATASET=/data/iRODS/Vault1/home/user1/Data/Screen1

# find the iRODS collection name that corresponds to the file path
COLLECTION=`iquest "%s" "select COLL_NAME where DATA_PATH like 
'%$DATASET%'"`

# find the address of the original OMERO server in iRODS metadata
OMEROHOST=`imeta ls -C $COLLECTION OMERO.host`

# register and tell where to look for metadata
bin/omero register --omerohost=$OMEROHOST $DATASET

Or something like that :)

Cheers,
Harri