[ome-users] Checksum functionality, feature request.

[Jake Carroll]

Hi OME crew. Happy new year.

I’ve been brain storming with colleagues over the last few hours and we had an interesting idea from a ‘digital fingerprint’ perspective.

We like the idea of a checksum (perhaps an MD5 or an SHA) for each image or image set. We believe it might be a functional and useful feature in terms of digital preservation or “fixity” semantics and might be useful for proof of ownership/attribution principles down the track.

Considering it, an MD5 on every data-set would be computationally fairly time consuming, so it’d definitely be a feature one could either turn on or off depending upon their circumstances and the computational power available to them (could have a boolean inside the omero config xml for whether it is turned on or off?), but I’d love to see an extra information pane inside the “General” tab of the OMERO.web or Insight viewer detailing the checksum of an image or a set of images.

We like the idea because it is effectively a mechanism of generating a digital watermark or fingerprint that does not have an impact on an image from a computational manipulation or transform perspective. It is also another arrow in the quiver of meta-data capability for OMERO.

Something for consideration that we’d love to see in the future.

Thank you for your consideration.

-jc
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