ome-ngff

Next-generation file format (NGFF) specifications for storing bioimaging data in the cloud.

Editing

Specifications are written in markdown, or technically bikeshed -- a markdown document, with special extensions understood by the bikeshed tool. The bikeshed tool is run on-commit via the spec-prod github action, generating the familiar "spec looking" ReSpec format. ReSpec is just html with a javascript ReSpec library.

Specification files end with the .bs file extension. The github action runs on commit to automatically convert to respec/html, via bikeshed.

Learn more about bikeshed

Reviewing

Commits on GitHub can be viewed using web services from the W3C:

• Rendered page: http://api.csswg.org/bikeshed/?url=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ome/ngff/master/0.2/index.bs
• Diff: https://services.w3.org/htmldiff?doc1=https%3A%2F%2Fngff.openmicroscopy.org%2F0.2%2F&doc2=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.csswg.org%2Fbikeshed%2F%3Furl%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent.com%2Fome%2Fngff%2Fmaster%2Flatest%2Findex.bs

New version

• Make new changes to latest/index.bs
• Update changelog at the bottom of latest/index.bs
• Find references to previous version and in most cases, bump to the current version.

JSON schemas

For each top-level metadata key of the OME-NGFF specification, JSON schemas are maintained for each version of the specification and stored under $VERSION/schemas/ or latest/schemas/. Tests validating these schemas must be implemented to follow principles of the JSON schema test suite and stored under $VERSION/tests/ or latest/tests/ to allow their execution on each CI build.

All official example snippets must also be extracted and managed as separate JSON files under $VERSION/examples/ or latest/examples/, validated by the appropriate schema by adding a .config.json file specifying the JSON schema to use and included in the specification document using the include-code directive.

The official OME-NGFF JSON schemas are published under https://ngff.openmicroscopy.org//schemas/<schema_name>.schema using the Spec prod GitHub action. When a new JSON schema is introduced, this action needs to be reviewed to update the deployment script and allow the publication of the schema.

Release process

• copy latest/index.bs to $VERSION/index.bs
• copy latest/copyright.include to $VERSION/copyright.include
• update the head matter in the $VERSIONed file
  • Use: Status: w3c/CG-FINAL
  • Update URL:
  • Use the following Status Text:: "This is the $VERSION release of this specification. Migration scripts will be provided between numbered versions. Data written with the latest version (an "editor's draft") will not necessarily be supported."
• update the footer matter in the $VERSIONed file
  • Version in the citation block including release date
• Update https://github.com/ome/spec-prod for the new version

Citing

Please see https://ngff.openmicroscopy.org/latest#citing for the latest citation.