OME Semantic Types

All information in OME revolves around a data structure called the object hierarchy. This hierarchy defines four kinds of objects — projects, datasets, images, and features — and an organizational structure for grouping these objects together. Follow the link to learn more about the object heirarchy.

Objects in the object hierarchy carry very little state themselves: name and owner. Each datum is a logically distinct object, called an attribute, that refers to an object in the object hierarchy. Each attribute is an instance of a semantic type. The semantic type defines several fields, or semantic elements, which specify the particular simple values that make up the data of the type. Absolutely all data in OME is stored as attributes. Douglas Creager wrote some more detailed info about attributes and semantic types.