OME Ontology: A Novel Data and Tool Integration Methodology for Multi-Modal Imaging in the Life Sciences

The Open Microscopy Environment (OME) platform OMERO is a web-based platform that realises a secure repository for light microscopy imaging data. Users can view, organise, analyse and share their imaging data. Given the importance of imaging in the life sciences, the imaging data in various datasets, including multi-omics and multi-modal imaging datasets, should be integrated. To this end, we are developing an ontology that integrates these datasets. We have already defined a light microscopy imaging ontology by translating the XML-based OME data model. This ontology has since been extended with a multi-modal imaging ontology with electron microscopy, X-ray computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. In a preliminary investigation, the extended ontology described the multimodal imaging metadata of RIKEN. This poster presents the details of the ontology, and our progress in publishing RDF-based multi-modal imaging metadata.