NIF and Microscopy Australia have helped prove that Europe, Australia and Japan can share bioimaging data across borders and data platforms – turning millions of locked-away images into a connected resource for discovery through the Horizon Europe foundingGIDE project which is now completed.
Bioimaging researchers in Europe, Australia and Japan now have access to foundational capabilities for sharing and discovering image data across borders, after the foundingGIDE – Founding a Global Image Data Ecosystem – project demonstrated the standards, tools and partnerships needed to connect repositories across the three regions.
Funded by Horizon Europe and administered by Euro-BioImaging, the nearly three-year project wrapped up in August 2026 with its technical deliverables in hand and its global imaging community larger than its partners had expected.
NIF and Microscopy Australia have driven Australia’s contribution, ensuring local capabilities and needs shape the standards the world will adopt.
The need has been clear for years. Researchers around the world generate millions of microscopy and biomedical imaging datasets every day, but every facility captures, labels and stores them differently.
Much of that data has sat locked inside individual organisations, invisible to the researchers who could build on it.
foundingGIDE brought together research infrastructures, data repositories and imaging communities from Europe, Australia and Japan to agree on shared standards, tools and working relationships.
An unmet need from the community
For Dr Aastha Mathur, Head of Image Data Services at Euro-BioImaging, foundingGIDE was a direct response to a problem researchers had been living with for years.
“From the foundingGIDE point of view, the interest was really an unmet need from the community,” Dr Mathur says. The technical driver, she says, was getting more out of data the facilities were already producing – connecting it, standardising metadata and storage formats, and making it ready for use with AI.
“We didn’t have to acquire any new data,” she says. “We just had to make sure that the things we were already doing were better connected.”
The payoff, she says, is significant. Access to shared data is “quite empowering – even re-using existing data has huge potential. If we can share it, the data becomes an enabling factor for new research and for methods development.”
Aligned roadmaps across Europe, Australia and Japan
One reason foundingGIDE has moved so quickly is that its goals were already on the to-do lists of the partner countries’ research infrastructures. Australia’s NCRIS-funded facilities – NIF and Microscopy Australia – have direct counterparts in Europe and Japan’s national research infrastructure roadmaps.
“The project has enabled us to tackle these important questions – questions that are already in line with what Australian, European and Japanese research infrastructure systems have on their roadmaps,” Dr Mathur says.
That alignment, she adds, is what made the project’s ambitious scope achievable. “If you had a to-do list with a lot of things on it, working together across Australia, Japan and Europe might suffer. foundingGIDE has been the perfect reason for us to actually do it.”
Delivering on the four pillars
foundingGIDE was built around four pillars: standardising data and metadata, connecting global infrastructures, embedding FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles, and building a sustainable ecosystem for the long term.
By the project’s end, Dr Mathur says, the concrete technical deliverables will be in researchers’ hands: recommendations on ontologies, shared metadata and exchange schemas, and search APIs that let users query multiple image data repositories at once.
“These things are ready and available to be used by the people,” she says. “We have concrete proof now that the imaging community can work together – and a place where people can find all this data, with support from Big Data holders and research infrastructures standing behind it.”
A community that pulled more community along with it
The technical wins matter, but Dr Mathur is most enthusiastic about what happened around them.
foundingGIDE convened workshops, online events and community gatherings that drew far bigger crowds than the partners had expected – including an October 2025 event in Brisbane co-hosted by NIF, Microscopy Australia and Euro-BioImaging, which brought international experts to Australia to work on data-sharing solutions.
“The magnitude of change has surpassed our expectations,” she says. “We’ve generated visibility for the concept of a global image data ecosystem that has gone well beyond what we planned.”
“Other regions and other partners are now interested in understanding what’s going on. We have massive participation in our community events because people want to know what we’re offering – and we’re working with pretty much the giants in the field.”
Research infrastructures, she notes, bring their local communities with them.
“A big reason that we managed to successfully attract the wider global community is our close collaboration with the Global BioImaging network,”Dr Mathur says. “Their extensive reach to 78 countries around the world added a real global dimension to the project.”
“Euro-BioImaging, German BioImaging, NIF and Microscopy Australia in Australia, the teams in Japan – infrastructures always bring a lot of the local and regional facilities along with them. They represent so many experts, and that has given the project real gravity and momentum.”
Next steps: sustaining the ecosystem
With the funded phase over, the partners are focused on making sure foundingGIDE’s outputs outlive the grant.
Project partners have committed to maintaining the ontologies, the metadata exchange schema and the common search API over the coming years. Euro-BioImaging, Global BioImaging and the research infrastructure partners will continue driving community engagement, extending the work into data stewardship and how metadata is recorded at individual facilities.
The team is also looking ahead to new opportunities – particularly around preparing image data for consumption by AI and extending the approach to new imaging modalities.
“It’s an exciting time to be working on this,” Dr Mathur says. “We’re trying to keep the community together so that when the next opportunity comes, we’re very well positioned to make the best of it.”
For NIF, Microscopy Australia and their NCRIS colleagues, foundingGIDE is a concrete demonstration that international scientific collaboration can deliver real, shared infrastructure and a reminder that the route from discovery to real-world impact increasingly runs through shared, standardised, and openly accessible data.