Add OME-Zarr support

[martinschorb]

Hi @trautmane ,

when meeting @bogovicj some time ago at EMBL, he told me that adding support for OME-Zarr metadata to the n5 client would be a matter of adding/modifying just a couple of lines.

We get a growing number of requests for OME-Zarr volumes. Do you think it would be possible to extend the code (maybe even upstream in the N5 libs) to enable this?

Thanks a lot!

[trautmane]

Hi @martinschorb ,

That sounds good/reasonable to me, but I'd need to get a better understanding of the OME-Zarr metadata spec. Do you know minimally what your requestors need? I also wonder how stable the OME-Zarr metadata spec is at this time? Finally, I wonder how this relates to the NGFF spec (maybe it is the same thing)?

[martinschorb]

Do you know minimally what your requestors need?

Basically a volume that meets the current OME-Zarr/NGFF specs.

https://github.com/ome/ngff

I also wonder how stable the OME-Zarr metadata spec is at this time? Finally, I wonder how this relates to the NGFF spec (maybe it is the same thing)?

see above. I think for simple things such as static volumes, I would not expect it to change much.

Probably your in-house experts @bogovicj , @mkitti , or @virginiascarlett are much more into it.

[trautmane]

Hi @martinschorb - just wanted to let you know that I got the chance to chat with @bogovicj about this on November 17th. I'm busy this week but hope to start work on this next week using the information I got from John. Sorry for the delay.