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

[Josh Moore]

On Dec 19, 2011, at 2:16 PM, Harri Jäälinoja wrote:

> Hi again,

Hi Harri,

>> 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:

That certainly seems plausible. Or, if iRODS supported "federated metadata" it could just proxy all the metadata from OMERO (I have *no* clue if this is possible or not)

> 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 :)

:) Seems like that last command would still end up creating two separate copies in OMERO. I guess it all depends on what one wants to do with the second iRODS replicate. If it's to launch, say, OMERO scripts, then there will need to be some way to go about getting the script to one of the replicates. Hmmm....

> Cheers,
> Harri

Cheers,
~Josh