Fig. 5: The third axis of the 4DN-BINA-OME Microscopy Metadata Specifications adds further flexibility to minimize the imaging experiment documentation burden.

Depicted is an example Venn diagram representing attributes that are required to document the characteristics of an objective lens and are stored in the <Objective> element of the 4DN-BINA-OME Core and the Basic extension. In the schema, objective attributes are color-coded based on their tier level and are subdivided into requirement-level categories based on the following criteria: (1) required (MUST) fields are necessary to validate claims and reproducibility; (2) recommended (SHOULD) fields are prescribed to ensure maximal image quality and sharing value. Color-coding is consistent with that used throughout the manuscript: green, Tier 1; orange, Tier 2; dark blue, Tier 3.