[ome-devel] Support Letters for OME

Sun Oct 4 15:12:21 BST 2015

Dear Jason

I am writing to express my support for OME’s efforts to obtain continual long term financial support to maintain and extend the project.
As you know, I am the academic director of Micron Oxford (www.micron<http://www.micron.ox.ac.uk/>.ox.ac.uk/<http://www.micron.ox.ac.uk/>), a consortium of biomedical research labs collaborating with physicists, engineers, computer scientists, chemists and mathematicians to develop and apply cutting-edge and novel imaging methods and image analysis algorithms. We are supported by a Strategic Award from the Wellcome Trust, which has just been renewed until 2020. We have a large number off of the shelf instrument as well as bespoke built super resolution instruments, both of which service a large user community across Oxford. We also play a coordinating role
for the considerable institutional support for advanced microscopy and synergistic cooperation across the major departments and institutes in Oxford housing biomedical researchers that use microscopy heavily.
My views below represent the collective views of most of the microscopy community of users of Micron facilities in Oxford.

We are major users of OMERO and were a satellite development site for OMERO functionality as part of the OMERO Wellcome Trust Strategic Award. Frankly, OMERO and OME-TIFF are currently the only show in town. The volume, diversity and complexity of the data we generate as a community mean that a centralised and well managed solution is required, and nothing else that I know of either in the commercial sector or publicly available sector comes in anyway close to OMERO for managing such data. Furthermore, we are developing all sorts of software, for example SIMCheck for quality control of structured illumination data and Quanticell, for supervised machine learning identification of specific cell type in large field of cells such as an intact brain. OME-TIFF allow us to completely bypass the need to worry about different file formats and diversity of sources of data from all sorts of microscopes made by different vendors.

We are particularly excited by the addition of OMEROfigure, a tool that is designed to allow researchers to produce publication quality figures directly from original data and alter the data used on the fly without constructing figures from scratch each time. This is not only a huge time sever and money saver (reducing or eliminating dependence on Illustrator and Photoshop), but promotes much better research practice, where original data that was used to make figure in papers can be identified and accessed easily and further examples of the same kind of data also identified easily when required. Are you know, we have been providing feedback for further improvements in the programme, and we very much encourage you to continue to develop this revolutionary programme with the help of the community.

We also encourage the OMERO team to continue the development of Auto-TAG, which allows easier and automated metadata entry from the keywords that are usually written into the file names created by microscope users. This overcomes the activation energy of users entering metadata descriptors of their data and again, promotes better practice and harmonising of annotations in a single group or community of researchers. Similarly, adding built in ImageJ capability without the need to move files to and from a server to the users desktop is a huge improvement.

We very much appreciate your considerable effort in developing and maintaining OMERO’s capability and are happy to support you in whatever way you would like us to. We hope the funding agencies realise how important the work on OMERO is and what a disaster it will be to biomedical research, if even some of the support were to dry up.

with best regards
Ilan

____________________________________________________________________________
Prof. Ilan Davis   ilan.davis at bioch.ox.ac.uk<mailto:ilan.davis at bioch.ox.ac.uk>   Web site: http://www.ilandavis.com
Department of Biochemistry, The University of Oxford, South Parks Road, OXFORD OX1 3QU, UK
Direct Office No: (44) (0)1865 613265  Office Fax: (44) (0)1865 613340
Lab manager: Dr Darragh Ennnis darragh.ennis at bioch.ox.ac.uk<mailto:darragh.ennis at bioch.ox.ac.uk> (44) (0)1865 613271 / 613272
PA: Sian Annely sian.annely at bioch.ox.ac.uk<mailto:sian.annely at bioch.ox.ac.uk>  (44) (0)1865 613218
____________________________________________________________________________

On 4 Oct 2015, at 14:28, Jason Swedlow (Staff) <j.r.swedlow at dundee.ac.uk<mailto:j.r.swedlow at dundee.ac.uk>> wrote:

Dear All-

Huge thanks for all the letters— an amazing response!!!

So this is the last chance— proposal is uploaded on Tuesday.  Having as many letters a possible is always great.   Again, the core mission of this particular proposal (one of a few we are submitting) is to have distributed logins, single sign-on, and federated data sources.

Thanks again for all your help and support.

Cheers,

Jason

From: Jason Swedlow <j.r.swedlow at dundee.ac.uk<mailto:j.r.swedlow at dundee.ac.uk>>
Date: Friday, 25 September 2015 13:04
To: OME Users <ome-users at lists.openmicroscopy.org.uk<mailto:ome-users at lists.openmicroscopy.org.uk>>, OME Development <ome-devel at lists.openmicroscopy.org.uk<mailto:ome-devel at lists.openmicroscopy.org.uk>>
Subject: Support Letters for OME

Dear All-

We’re continuing to submit funding proposals for funding OME’s core work.  Our next proposal is due at the beginning of October, where we are targeting distributed logins and data sources.

In suport of this proposal, we have the opportunity to include letters of support for the overall project, that is, for the OME Consortium and use of OME-TIFF, Bio-Formats and OMERO.  These statements are very important, as they show the value and utility of the software we build and deliver to the community.

Thus, we’d ask you all to consider writing a short email (to me) that presents your thoughts on OME’s work, its utility in supporting your and/or your colleague’s science, and any ideas or suggestions for our future work.  Please do send these by Oct. 5.

Please do not take our work, and by extension, funding for our work for granted.  Without your explicit support, we can’t demonstrate the importance to the wider community or justify continued funding.

As always, thanks in advance for your help and support.

Cheers,

Jason

--------------------
Centre for Gene Regulation & Expression | Open Microscopy Environment | University of Dundee

Phone:  +44 (0) 1382 385819
email: j.swedlow at dundee.ac.uk<mailto:j.swedlow at dundee.ac.uk>

Web: http://www.lifesci.dundee.ac.uk/people/jason-swedlow
Open Microscopy Environment: http://openmicroscopy.org<http://openmicroscopy.org/>

The University of Dundee is a registered Scottish Charity, No: SC015096
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