Date: November 2nd – 6th, 2026
Location: Irchel Campus, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057 Zürich
(Struggling to find the room? OME-Zarr to the rescue! Check out this OME-Zarr movie in ViZarr or explore this OME-Zarr movie in your viewer of choice)
Bioimage analysis is evolving to address challenges of big data, dealing with complex modalities like 3D and time-resolved imaging and working towards more FAIR image data and image analysis workflows. A big driver for standardization is the development of the OME Next Generation File Format. As a community, we’re working together towards version 1 of OME-Zarr.
Following up on the successful hackathons in 2023, 2024 (see resulting preprint) & 2025, we are bringing together leading developers and researchers again this fall in Zurich Switzerland. Major topics of the hackathon will be OME-Zarr RFCs, OME-Zarr V1, OME-Zarr viewers, OME-Zarr tooling and OME-Zarr workflows.
Topics
This year’s hackathon will tackle the following topics. The details will be planned in pre-hackathon meetings.
- OME-Zarr RFCs:
- RFC8: Collections
- RFC8: Extensibility
- Single-file (zipped) OME-Zarr
- Your RFC of choice
- OME-Zarr V1 effort
- OME-Zarr Viewers
- OME-Zarr in Python
- OME-Zarr in Java
- Workflows with OME-Zarrs
Target audience
- Your day-to-day work involves image analysis, data management, specification development and/or tool development for image analysis
- You are involved in developing tools, making tools accessible to others or shaping image analysis standards
- You are already working with OME-Zarr in some capacity
Applications
The virtual elements of Monday, November 2nd will be broadly accessible to participants wanting to join.
The in-person 2026 OME-Zarr Hackathon has a limited number of seats. A selected number of applicants will be invited to participate by the organizing committee from their application. The hackathon is intended for participants already working with OME-Zarr.
If you’re new to OME-Zarr and would like to learn more about it, we invite you to join the quarterly OME-NGFF community calls (as announced on image.sc, look for the ome-ngff tag) or the Open Bioimaging Practices Meetups.
Applications are open until September 15th, and selected participants will be confirmed latest in early October.
We have limited travel support available. Please indicate in the last question whether travel support is required for your attendance.
Apply to the hackathon by September 15th
For up-to-date information as well as the program and additional info, please check out the offiicial Hackathon Notiuon site!
https://biovisioncenter.notion.site/2026-ome-zarr-hackathon
