+
Introduction
+
+ The 2024 OME-NGFF Challenge
+ was conceived at the
+
+ OME Annual Community Meeting
+ in Dundee in May 2024. The stated goals of Challenge were:
+
+
+
+ -
+ Collect examples of OME-Zarr from multiple modalities, use cases, and
+ institutions, available from a single location.
+
+ -
+ Test the utility (and lack thereof) of existing OME-Zarr metadata and
+ image viewers.
+
+ -
+ Advance the adoption of the Zarr V3 specification, and also existing
+ OME-Zarr RFCs.
+
+
+
+ The inspiration for the Challenge came from presentations at the OME Meeting
+ that demonstrated the level of adoption of OME-Zarr, but highlighted the
+ poor findability of the data.
+
+
+ Work on the challenge started in earnest in July 2024. All progress is
+ tracked in the ome2024-ngff-challenge
+ repo. It was agreed that the results
+ of the OME-NGFF Challenge would be presented at the
+
+ 2024 Global BioImaging Meeting.
+
+
+
Process
+
+ The Challenge was run via a series of virtual meetings coordinated on the
+ Image.sc Forums, with all
+ notes and lists of participants
+ available.
+
+
+
Results
+
+ At the outset, we weren’t sure how much OME-Zarr data was available, if it
+ could be converted to Zarr V3, or how many organisations would participate.
+ In the end, we have far exceeded our expectations, with more than 0.5 PByte
+ of OME-Zarr made available, across a wide range of modalities.
+
+
+ To make the assembly as accessible as possible, we built the the OME-NGFF
+ Challenge Viewer [URL?}, which incorporates a CSV with locations of
+ datasets, and connects datasets to the OME NGFF Validator, for metadata
+ validation and viewing.
+
+
+ Perhaps the most important outcome of the Challenge is the establishment of
+ a federated bioimage data system based on OME-Zarr. To our knowledge, this
+ is the largest federated bioimage data collection ever assembled.
+
+