Founding a Global Image Data Ecosystem

2026-07-22

Digital image data is a crucial part of biological research, fueling an exponentially growing body of research output. A surge in volume and diversity of bioimage data, owing to the fast developing imaging technologies, has brought to light many challenges including in sharing open image data. Resource owners, research infrastructures as well as grass-roots communities are actively tackling these challenges by developing file formats, ontologies, metadata models, to ensure that shared data is in line with the FAIR principles. However, many of these solutions remain regional and a global coordination effort is necessary to enable seamless image data sharing. This project will lay the foundation for a Global Image Data Ecosystem (GIDE) that connects different biological and biomedical image data resources across the globe to allow metadata and data sharing. GIDE will bring European research infrastructure and image data resource owners together with their counterparts from Australia and Japan to develop the basis of image data sharing. These interactions can then be used as a blueprint to engage with the wider global bioimage data community while strengthening the position of European infrastructures in the landscape. To enable partner resources and research infrastructures to communicate in one language, coordinated technical development towards use of harmonised imaging ontologies and metadata models will be carried out. Proof of concept implementations using harmonised image data and metadata will showcase the project developments and encourage adoption of these recommendations globally. These developments will also lay a crucial and strong foundation to build a future federated image data ecosystem on. Together, global efforts towards GIDE will provide a necessary framework for bioimage data to grow into a democratised resource enabling innovative research in Europe and across the globe.

Finland

2025-10-01