Poster presented at: 4D Nucleome Annual Meeting and 2019 4DN-ASCB Satellite Meeting: Bridging the 4D Genome with Cell Biology, Washington, DC (https://www.4dnucleome.org/4dn-ascb-meeting-2019-abstract-guidelines.html)Conference date: December, 5-6 2019Abstract:Quantitative analysis, interpretation, and integration of imaging data require metadata describing microscope hardware, imaging settings, and instrument performance. However, there is no universal standard for microscope metadata requirements or user-friendly tools to support their collection. In accompanying abstracts, we describe proposed 4DN standards for optical and intensity calibration and recent advances in the definition of a 4DN extension of the OME Core metadata model, which includes a tiered system of reporting guidelines that scales required metadata content with experimental complexity. In this abstract, we introduce a novel application, named Micro-Meta App that provides a user-friendly interface for documenting imaging experiments. The user’s data processing workflow consists of the following steps: 1) “Create Microscope” modality. First, the App allows the users to build a graphical representation of the microscope hardware by dragging-and-dropping individual components onto the workspace and entering the relevant attribute values based on the selected tier level. Then, Micro-Meta App generates tier-specific descriptions of the microscope hardware and outputs them as interoperable JSON files that can be used as templates and shared with the community, which significantly lowers the record-keeping burden. 2) “Use Microscope” modality. In this modality, Micro-Meta App opens an existing JSON Microscope file and interactively guides the user through the collection of instrument-specific and tier-appropriate image acquisition settings and calibration metrics. Finally, the App generates JSON files that contain comprehensive descriptions of the conditions utilized to produce individual microscopy datasets, and that can be stored on the user’s file system or the 4DN data portal. After demonstrating the feasibility of this approach which we presented in 2018, we are in the final stages of the development of both a Javascript (JS) React implementations of the software to be incorporated into the 4DN data portal and the OMERO database as well as a stand-alone JS Electron version is being developed to lower the barrier of adoption of the tool by labs that do not have access to imaging databases.