Towards interactive exploration of images, meta-data, and analytic results in the open microscopy environment

The collection, management, and analysis of microscopy data present numerous informatics challenges. Appropriate user tools are needed to support acquisition, creation, analysis, annotation and interpretation of microscopy data. The Open Microscopy Environment (OME) is a database-driven system for the storage, analysis, management, and interpretation of microscopy data. An examination of these tasks in the context of regularly occurring structures in OME´s data model motivates a framework for constructing these tools. Initial implementations of several components, linked together in a common environment, provide a partial realization of this framework.