[ome-devel] OMERO.features: Development of a new API for storing image features

[Vebjorn Ljosa]

(I hit send too early … here is the other point I'd like to make.)

On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 9:23 AM, Lee Kamentsky <leek at broadinstitute.org> wrote:
>>
>> It's possible at query time the feature for the given image/ROI/sample
>> hasn't even been calculated yet. The API would need to satisfy the request
>> either from features stored in the database or calculated on the fly. BISQUE
>> has functionality that works like this called the Feature Service.

I think the rationale for Bisque's feature service is that some
feature-extraction methods may have hairy dependencies and be
difficult to build. I don't see a use case for calculating features on
demand; for any large image set, the time to retrieve the original
images would be prohibitive, so image analusis (including feature
calculation) would have to be done ahead of time.

Also, it would be difficult to maintain old versions of
feature-extraction algorithms, especially when different versions have
different dependencies. We frequently depend on being able to rerun a
five-year-old analysis with the same version of the software (bugs and
all).

Vebjorn