Who is OME?

The Open Microscopy Environment (OME) is a multi-site collaborative effort among academic laboratories 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 are free, and all OME source code is available under GNU public "copyleft" licenses.

OME is developed as a joint project between research-active laboratories at the Dundee, NIA Baltimore, and Harvard Medical School and LOCI.
In addition, OME has active collaborations with many imaging and informatics groups.

While many other applications could use OME's architecture and design, our specific implementation is limited to biological microscopy. Those interested in applying OME's technology to other applications should contact the developers.

OME work is divided into several different standards and software projects:

• Bio-Formats A Java-based library for reading and writing over 70 microscopy file formats.
• OMERO Software The Java-based OMERO software project, which currently includes tools for storing, visualising, managing, and annotating microscopic images and metadata.
• OME-XML & OME-TIFF The OME-XML and OME-TIFF file format specifications, which are open file formats for sharing microscope image data.
• OME Server This was the original OME server project which has now ended and is a legacy product. It implements image-based analysis of cellular dynamics and image-based screening of cellular localisation or phenotypes, and included a fully developed version of the 2003 version of OME-XML Schema language.