Rename to OME-Zarr?

[normanrz]

I understand that the name OME-NGFF was a great choice for rallying the community around a new standardized, chunked, cloud-native image format. However, it is quite unspecific and will not age well. I am proposing to rename the format and specification to OME-Zarr. This will also make the relationship with Zarr clearer and might even broaden the appeal of the format for other communities.

[joshmoore]

Some background: @normanrz, @bogovicj and I had an extended discussion while trying to write a text how best to explain this. It's not straight-forward and some clarity would definitely be good.

That being said, I think the "NGFF" better is still drawing support, and so though I definitely agree that it's not going to age well, I'm not sure we're there yet.

Here are some steps & definitions that I could see us working towards:

• Add a naming section towards the beginning of the spec and a format specific OME-Zarr section toward the end
• Clearly explain that the format that's being implemented is OME-Zarr
• Define NGFF as the process of defining new specifications which we're all working on (so that it can end at some point).
• (Eventually?) replace OME-Zarr specific sections of the spec with more generic representations so that the specs could be used elsewhere.

[sbesson]

I see no fundamental objection to reworking the relevant portions of the specifications and clarify the relationship between NGFF and Zarr.

Adding a bit of historical perspective, OME-Zarr vs OME-NGFF has been a subject lengthy discussions ~18months ago and the outcome was to settle on OME-NGFF. Since then, this name has been used in the peer-review manuscript describing the format, re-used and cited by several others academic publications and is increasingly used in various promotions materials, workshops from OME and the global community.

Stating the obvious, nothing is set into stone forever and it is healthy to have these discussions as I agree the confusion between the terms exists. The biggest concern I would like to raise is that there is a big cost to rebranding which goes beyond updating the specification document and should not be underestimated. In the worst scenario, doing this wrongly would create an even more confusing state where people would think OME-NGFF and OME-Zarr are two completely separate formats allowing to store data.