[ome-users] User Feedback

[Jerome Avondo]

Hi,

I had a long meeting with our users, here at the John Innes Centre, about the OMERO platform and specifically the OMERO.insight and OMERO.importer.

This was to give them a good overview of the system, and try and identify how it would fit with our use cases, with the ultimate goal to get them to start using it.

A couple points came up which I thought I would report back,

Firstly, let me say overall impression is that it looks great, and is something we want/will to adopt for the whole lab. :)

Three main issues did however come up...

1) Project, Dataset...

The Project, Dataset hierarchy was something people found quite abstract, and did not really understand what this related to in their day to day. And by this I mean they found it related to many things, but just couldn't figure out what is, if any, the best way to use this...

Some cases were should Projects be the type of data it is, like confocal, light microscopy, optical projection tomography or the grant project or etc.. And then Datasets could be the type of the experiment or species or probe imaged or etc...

They found it very hard to relate these two entities to just single real world scenarios... And people came up with many many different ways this could be used...

So maybe this is something the OMERO community can help us with. What kind of things do you represent with the Project/Dataset hierarchy, is there any "best practice" I can guide them with?

2) Data sharing...

In the lab we have a strong policy of data sharing, where the notion of users does not really exist. For example we use a wiki to publish/report/talk about our finding, where everyone can see everything and contribute to anything.

Likewise for our file store, this is a common network drive, where no data is divided on a per user basis.

This is mainly done for data longevity, in that when people leave, we know where to find the ex-members data, as we all store our data in the same way. As what we found was when someone left, if they had their own personal way of storing data, then this would be very difficult for anyone else to actually find it again. What makes sense to you doesn't necessarily make sense to someone else, is the motto here really...

So when looking at the OMERO.insight people where a bit worried how each user can have their own data hierarchy, as this is something we have tried to stay away from. 

What I thought we could do, was still manage the data on a per-user level but also have a special single account for the whole lab, and make sure all data is also kept in this common hierarchy, but there might be better ways to address this.

I also see that in OMERO.insight that Projects/Datasets/Images seem to default as private. What implications does this exactly have? And I can't seem to find any way to change this status to public.

3) Tags and importing...

People understood the power of Tags, and really liked it.

However there was some concern over how this happens after the import, and that this was really a recipe for people just not bothering to tag anything. People seemed to agree on at least a minimum of what we called core tags, like what species it is, probe used, etc.. This minimum is something that we found should be forced on data import. To ensure all data has a minimum description. There was also some concerns over how tags have to be added one by one, and this can quickly become tedious so the idea of templates for tags was something they liked.

That's really the main feedback I got at the meeting, the next meeting we will be having is defining what tags we use. As this is something we think we need to have a good stab at getting right from the start.

Of course all I said here really only reflects how we would like to use OMERO and I understand this does not reflect the whole community as a whole. And the great thing is we can still implement our own clients/importers to customize OMERO to our needs...

But nonetheless I thought this would be useful to firstly give you some feedback, and secondly check that we haven't misunderstood how it should be used, so if anything I've said is something you disagree with please do say so!

J.

_________________________________________________________________
Celebrate a decade of Messenger with free winks, emoticons, display pics, and more.
http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/157562755/direct/01/