The BioImage Archive (BIA), EMBL-EBI’s data resource for open life sciences image data, provides general-purpose deposition services for any imaging dataset accompanying a publication, as well as reference image data. The BIA currently supports basic deposition of image annotations together with corresponding images. As part of the recently awarded Horizon Europe project, AI4LIFE, we would like to improve the BioImage Archive’s support for image annotations as part of AI-ready datasets.
In particular, we wish to make deposited annotations as widely usable as possible, adhering to the FAIR principles of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability. This is particularly challenging for image annotations, since there are few standards for representing annotation data that are widely adopted across the community.
Towards this end, we will hold a workshop involving participants from the bioimaging AI community, including data generators, annotators, AI researchers and software/tool developers.