  While the FAIR principles are well accepted in the scientific community, the
implementation of appropriate metadata editing and transfer to ensure FAIR
research data in practice is significantly lagging behind. On the one hand, it
strongly depends on the availability of tools that efficiently support this
step in research data management. On the other hand, it depends on the
available standards regarding the interpretability of metadata. Here, we
introduce a tool, MDEmic, for editing metadata of microscopic imaging data in
an easy and comfortable way that provides high flexibility in terms of
adjustment of metadata sets. This functionality was in great demand by many
researchers applying microscopic techniques. MDEmic has already become a part
of the standard installation package of the image database OMERO as OMERO.mde.
This database helps to organize and visualize microscopic image data and keep
track of their further processing and linkage to other data sets. For this
reason, many imaging core facilities provide OMERO to their users. We present a
use case scenario for the tailored application of OMERO.mde to imaging data of
an institutional OMERO-based Membrane Dye Database, which requires specific
experimental metadata. Similar to public image data repositories like the Image
Data Resource, IDR, this database facilitates image data storage including rich
metadata which enables data mining and re-use, one of the major goals of the
FAIR principles.
