Hi Jason,
I think your idea of at least logging the changes is sensible.
One should be able to edit ANY metadata.
Systems are often set up incorrectly with false metadata.
Its up to the user to make sure its right.
OMERO cant be expected to police the quality of the meta data,
only try its best to archive / store it in a version controlled
manner.
by 2 cents
Dan White
Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2009 20:09:54 +0000
From: Jason Swedlow <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Metadata editability
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Dear All-
Apologies-- this is not a direct confocal question, but it does affect
use
and analysis of confocal data. If you don't care about image
metadata, then
just ignore and delete.
As the OME project moves towards release of OMERO-Beta4 (
http://trac.openmicroscopy.org.uk/omero/roadmap), we have a number of
issues
coming up we'd like feedback on.
The first is metadata editability. In Beta4, we've gone for something
we
call "metadata completion". This means that, for a given image file
format,
we capture and find a home for all of the metadata in that format
which fits
into OMERO. For some formats, that's easy, because there is so little
metadata. But many are quite rich, and this project has been a huge
effort
by the Bio-Formats (Melissa Linkert) and OMERO (Brian Loranger, Chris
Allan,
Jean-Marie Burel) teams.
The result is that we will support 5 rich file formats in Beta4
"completely". Note that we have to make decision about what each
piece of
metadata means-- we certify that it has been imported into OMERO,
although
there are a few edge cases where we've had to make decisions about where
each piece of metadata goes.
This raises a critical question, that we have debated within OME for
years,
namely:
What image metadata should be editable? Imagine that some value was
either
unset or wrongly set on the microscope, a user may want to correct the
situation after import. Then, if we allow editing, how much info about
that
editing should we track?
Some technical points:
-- in OMERO, we store every write to the DB as an Event. So we know
every
change, who did it and when.
-- we really do NOT want to store every metadata change made. Doing
this
properly means making multiple copies of every database entry every
time one
thing changes-- so things get bloated very rapidly.
A compromise we are considering seriously-- keep only the last metadata
value, but log all the changes. If a user has changed any metadata that
came with an image fille, we can add functionality to the client
applications to let the user find this out. You'll know that the data
has
changed, by whom, and when, you just wont know what the previous data
was.
If necessary, we could implement an audit database, which stores
previous
metadata versions, or maybe just the first version-- the one that was
acquired with the original . This would be optional-- if needed it
could be
turned on. We won't get that done for the first Beta4.0 release, but if
it's a priority, it could come later this year.
Thanks for your ideas and comments.
Cheers,
Jason
Dr. Daniel James White BSc. (Hons.) PhD
Senior Microscopist / Image Processing and Analysis
Light Microscopy Facility
Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics
Pfotenhauerstrasse 108
01307 DRESDEN
Germany
New Mobile Number!!!
+49 (0)15114966933 (German Mobile)
+49 (0)351 210 2627 (Work phone at MPI-CBG)
+49 (0)351 210 1078 (Fax MPI-CBG LMF)
http://www.bioimagexd.net
http://www.chalkie.org.uk
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