BIA Integrator: purpose

One of the long term goals of the BioImage Archive is to make sufficiently-well-annotated large and varied biological imaging data available in a consistent format by standardised APIs. To do this, we need to solve a number of problems:

• Image data are stored in many different formats across data repositories.

• The metadata stored with images is often incomplete, and needs additional information to enable interpretation.

• Both image data and metadata should be provided to consumers by a consistent API.

The BIA Integrator serves addresses these problems, and supports our long-term goal by providing:

• An API to interrogate the studies and images we have, and get access to different representations of those images.

• Easy annotation of datasets and images, while maintaining annotations as separate objects.

• Consistent identifiers for images, so that they can be tracked, converted and referenced.

On top of the BIA Integrator, by using its API, we can build:

• Conversion pipelines for images.

• Extraction of metadata from images and storage as annotations.

• Web pages that visualise images and present metadata together with images.