[3dem] EMPIAR and the EMBL-EBI BioImage Archive

[Osman Salih]

Today, 2 July 2019, EMBL-EBI announced the launch of its BioImage 
Archive (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/bioimage-archive/); see the press release 
at: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/about/news/press-releases/bioimage-archive-launch.

EMPIAR (https://empiar.org/) is an active component of this new 
initiative which will enable it to grow into a sustainable 
petabyte-scale resource over the next few years.

Using funding from the UK Research and Innovation Strategic Priorities 
Fund, EMBL-EBI is building IT infrastructure to support the BioImage 
Archive, including a scalable storage architecture (object store), from 
which EMPIAR will benefit. EMPIAR is already getting too big to be 
supported by NFS file systems and will therefore be migrating to the 
object store over the next few months. As the changes only involve the 
back-end of EMPIAR, we anticipate that they will not affect deposition 
or retrieval of EMPIAR data. The web-based user interfaces for both 
deposition and retrieval of EMPIAR data will appear unchanged.

Last year, EMPIAR became an official EMBL-EBI resource, which, together 
with it becoming part of the BioImage Archive, will improve the support 
for and long-term sustainability of EMPIAR. This will help EMPIAR 
transition from a small pilot archive with a relatively narrow scope 
(raw 2D image data related to EMDB entries) at its launch in 2014 to a 
versatile, integrated and sustainable resource for EM-related bioimaging 
data.

As the BioImage Archive is being built up over the next few years, 
EMPIAR users and depositors will experience additional benefits. For 
instance, integration of the archiving of light-microscopy data and EM 
data will enable transparent deposition and retrieval of data for 
correlative imaging modalities such as CLEM and CLXM. It will also 
enable linking and integration of diverse bioimaging datasets from a 
variety of modalities and on a range of length scales.

For any questions in this matter, please contact the EMPIAR helpdesk at: 
empdep-help at ebi.ac.uk.

--The EMPIAR Team at EMBL-EBI


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