Future Development

Our goal in 2009 and 2010 has been to deliver a fully functional OMERO application for use in microscopy and High Content Screening. With our Beta-4.2.x releases, we have re-enabled shared data access, and have provided access to our scripting service, improved delete functionality, and extended our facilities for storing tabular data and Regions of Interest (ROIs). This lays the foundation for more sophisticated image analysis and processing in OMERO. The scripting functions we have released stand as examples and templates for the development of new image analysis tools by others against the OMERO framework.

In our next releases, we will extend this facility, improving performance of the server, and fully enabling distribution of processing tasks. We will also add support for directly viewing user and server file systems. A few highlights scheduled for the remainder 2010:

• Updating of the OME data model to allow support of N-dimensional data.

• Improved handling of very large images to ensure that OMERO can be used in applications that use tiling (e.g., digital pathology).

• Improved visualization tools for large images sets (e.g. HCS)-- heatmaps, etc.

• Improved support for embedding web browser visualization tools in external applications ('put OMERO on my page').
  

• Extension of the functionality for OMERO.fs, to continue to drive flexible access to image data.

• Extension of OMERO to broader range of imaging applications to include fluorescence lifetime microscopy, electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy.
  

As always, our server and client roadmaps are available. We welcome queries and comments. Get involved!