This repository contains the source code for the napari hub, a place to find, evaluate, and install napari plugins, built by the Imaging Team at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
For our first alpha/v0 release in June 2021, the napari hub will focus on making it easy for Research Biologists, Imaging Scientists, and Bioimage Analysts to find, evaluate, and install napari plugins distributed through PyPI.
After talking with users about the challenges and needs in finding analysis solutions to bioimaging problems, we focused on a handful of critical features for our first release, including...
- global search bar which returns results from multiple metadata sources (title, author, summary, description, etc.)
- napari-specific metadata, such as author(s), links to external docs, support channels, etc., that plugin developers can easily define in PyPI metadata or Github config files
- napari-specific description supports both napari-specific description specified in their Github repo or default to PyPI description if plugin developer does not use napari-specific description.
- install “call-to-action” button for each plugin with plugin-specific instructions on how to install
- filter/sort available plugins based on limited selection of metadata (2-3 filters, 1-2 sorts) that can be handled client side
- mailing list sign up for announcements and updates for the napari hub
The imaging team is comprised of product managers, user experience researchers, designers and engineers that learn with and from the community to build out the napari hub. Our process involves weekly syncs to track progress across disiplines, review and share assets. Just as our product is open source, we want our process to be as well. You can learn more by exploring:
- product strategy documents that inform how we'll make the napari hub a reality
- user experience research findings that help us understand the community's challenges and how the napari hub can help
- design sketches and prototypes that bring napari hub features to life
- engineering specs and diagrams that help us understand how the napari hub works behind the scenes
After our alpha launch, we're very excited to keep iterating and building new features that are of value to the imaging community, supporting current and future napari users and developers.
We have a host of ideas for ways that we can help scientists learn if a plugin is right for them, for imaging scientists to share their knowledge with core facility users and collaborators, and ways to help lower barriers for image analysts in creating, maintaining, and supporting their plugins. If you want to share your own ideas on what we should improve or add, we'd love you to submit a feature request! This will help us ensure the experience functions as intended for the community.
We’ll be using this feedback from the community, along with User Experience Research, and consultation with the napari project to prioritize which features we decide to build.
When we have a clearer idea of our roadmap beyond our June release, we'll share it here.
The napari hub is built, maintained, and governed by the Imaging team at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative as a free service for the napari community.
napari is a consensus-based community project and an open source tool that enables high performance visualization and exploration of a broad range of imaging data, including microscopy, medical imaging, geospatial data, and more, with clearly defined governance model, mission, and values. At CZI, we support the development of open source and community run tools like napari, as part of our mission to accelerate biomedical research and help every scientist make progress faster.
The CZI Imaging Team seeks to remove barriers in the analysis of imaging and microscopy data and make it easier for biologists to access emerging methods for bioimage analysis that leverage machine learning. CZI sees promise in napari and seeks to assist its development by providing resources not always available to the open source community, including dedicated user research, design, and engineering support. CZI is proud to collaborate with the science community to accelerate research and enable open science for all.
- Jeremy Asuncion, Engineering (@codemonkey800)
- Kira Evans, Engineering (@kne42)
- Justin Kiggins, Product (@neuromusic)
- Justine Larsen, Engineering (@justinelarsen)
- Ziyang Liu, Engineering (@ziyangczi)
- Lucy Obus, User Experience (@LCObus)
- Lia Prins, Design (@liaprins-czi)
- Nicholas Sofroniew, Product (@sofroniewn)
We're building the napari hub out in the open, so if you want to contribute or get a sneak, please take a look at:
This project adheres to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code. Please report unacceptable behavior to opensource@chanzuckerberg.com.