Welcome to the Open Microscopy Environment (OME) Website
OME is a multi-site collaborative effort among academic labs and a number of commercial entities that produces open tools to support data management for biological light microscopy. Designed to interact with existing commercial software, all OME formats and software is free, and all OME source code is available under GNU public "copyleft" licenses.
OME is divided into several different standards and software projects:
 | The original OME server project, which implements image-based analysis of cellular dynamics and image-based screening of cellular localization or phenotypes, and includes a fully developed OME-XML Schema language. |
 | The java-based OMERO software project, which currently includes tools for storing, visualizing, managing, and annotating microscopic images and metadata. |
 | The Bio-Formats java library for reading and writing popular microscopy file formats. |
 | The OME-XML and OME-TIFF file format specifications, which are standardized file formats for microscopy imaging. |
Latest News
- 5-May-2008
- Minutes from the 2008 OME European User's Meeting
The Usable Image team were part of our successful Paris meeting and they have collated and published minutes. They are available at here. - 29/30-Apr-2008
- 2008 OME European User's Meeting
The OME Consortium will hold a User's Meeting hosted by the Plateforme d'Imagerie Dynamique, Institut Pasteur. The Programme is now available. - 29-Feb-2008
- OME-XML Major Version Release
We are pleased to announce a major update to the OME-XML schema files. These files provide the authoritative description of the OME Data Model. Details of the release are available on the OME-XML site. - 20-Dec-2007
- OMERO3.0-Beta2.3 Released!
OMERO Beta2.3 provides a number of performance enhancements in OMERO.server, a user-settable image compression system and image tagging in OMERO.insight, and a new history function in OMERO.importer. Full details are available for OMERO.server and OMERO.insight. Download the server and client builds. - 11-Dec-2007
- OME booth at ASCB
We would like to thank everyone who stopped buy our booth at ASCB. It was great to see you all and hear about your work. We are sorry if you were kept waiting for a demo of OMERO but demand was pretty constant all day. If you could not wait to see the demo or would like to see more we recommend the videos on our How To page. - 1-Dec-2007 to 5-Dec-2007
- American Society for Cell Biology 47th Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, USA
We will have representatives from many of our collaborative institutions attending the ASCB Annual Meeting in Washington. This year we are also running an Exhibition Booth where you can see demonstrations of our work. If you are attending the meeting you are most welcome to stop by and talk to us about your needs. The exhibition floor is open from the 2nd to the 4th of December. Full details of the event are on the American Society for Cell Biology 47th Annual Meeting site. - 8-Nov-2007 (Swedlow Group)
- OME-TIFF and OME-XML file validator
To help check the integrity of OME files we have produced an online validator. This understands the 2004 and 2007 schemas and can process both OME-TIFF and OME-XML files. It is avaliable at http://validator.openmicroscopy.org.uk/
If you want to know more about these file formats, visit http://www.ome-xml.org/ and/or http://www.openmicroscopy.org/formats/ - 22-Oct-2007 (Swedlow Group)
- OME and OMERO Movies
We've produced a series of screencast movies that describe various OME resources and demonstrate installation and use of the OMERO software suite. Available from the How To page. - 18-Oct-2007
- OME-XML Minor Version Release
We are pleased to announce a minor update to the OME-XML schema files. These files provide the authoritative description of the OME Data Model. Details of the release are available on the OME-XML site. - 4-Oct-2007 (Goldberg Group)
- OME 2.6.1 Release
A new point release of the OME server. Major features include LDAP support, improved MATLAB+OME connection and integration with BioFormats (provided by the LOCI Group) Available from the downloads page. - 14-Aug-2007
- Another Commercial Imaging Company Supports OME-TIFF!
Improvision has announced support for OME-TIFF, and joins a growing list of commercial companies that support the OME File Formats. - 10-Aug-2007 (Swedlow Group)
- New site for OME-XML development!
We are pleased to announce a new web site http://www.ome-xml.org/ that will be used to track the ongoing development of the OME-XML data model and provide a location where changes to the model can be proposed. The site also has details of the changes included in the June 2007 release of the XSD Schema. - 25-June-2007 (Swedlow Group)
- OMERO 3.0-Beta2 is officially released.
Beta2 includes several updates to the server to improve performance and stability, and new versions of the OMERO.importer and OMERO.insight clients, including support for four more proprietary file formats and substantial improvements to image viewing and management. Full details are available for OMERO.server and OMERO.insight. Download the server and client builds. - 15-May-2007
- The OME Consortium held its annual developers meeting in beautiful Madison WI on the campus of UW. Notes from the meeting
are here. In summary:
- An updated OME Data Model and OME-XML file will be released by June 15. See OME-XML Evolution for details.
- Ilya Goldberg's lab has developed a pattern recognition system for OME based on WND-CHARM available from CVS.
- The Consortium decided to take a series of steps towards adding much of the functionality of the current OME Server to the OMERO platform. The end result of this development path will be one OME Server Platform driven by OMERO with the analysis engine capabilities of the current OME server system. Specifically a series of updated functions will be added to the OMERO server to include support for distributed computation, a method to allow data model updates, a workflow engine, support for the existing OME Server Web UI. Our aim is to use the WND-CHARM application to drive the requirements for these pieces of functionality in the OMERO Server. We currently aim to complete this work by Q1/08. More details of these plans are available in the meeting notes.
- 29/30-Mar-07
- The OME Consortium held a User's Meeting hosted by the Plateforme d'Imagerie Dynamique, Institut Pasteur. The Programme
included presentations from academic and commercial OME users and developers. Presentations will be available by June 5. In summary:
- The meeting concluded that OME-TIFF and Bio-Formats were critical strategic tools for the communtiy that must be fully developed and documented and be exapnded to support a range of programming environments.
- An easy-to-use flexible system for supporting image analysis must be provided by the OME Consortium.
- OME tools must easily integrate into both small lab and large imaging facility environments.
Also see the Latest News for other updates and events.
This site is under active development; we are adding new articles to the site on a regular basis. In addition, you can find the current progress of our next release.