Submissions/International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) -- an emerging global standard for mashing images from different sites

After careful consideration, the Programme Committee has decided not to accept the below submission at this time. Thank you to the author(s) for participating in the Wikimania 2015 programme submission, we hope to still see you at Wikimania this July.

Submission no.: 3058

Title of the submission: International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) -- an emerging global standard for mashing images from different sites

Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop): presentation

Author of the submission: James Heald

E-mail address: j.healducl.ac.uk

Username: Jheald

Country of origin: UK

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)

Personal homepage or blog

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal): provisional

This talk will give an introduction to IIIF, an increasingly visible open standard for serving parts of images and image metadata, developed by a consortium of research libraries, national libraries, and not-for-profit image archives, to allow a free choice of viewers and servers to interoperate, and for tools to combine images from multiple repositories accessed using a single consistent API, based on defining a linked-data standard URI format to specify parts of an image or parts of a collection of images.

Institutions developing IIIF include the research libraries of the universities of Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Cornell and Oxford's Bodleian Library; national libraries including the National Library of Wales, the British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Royal Library of Denmark and the National Library of Austria; and non-profits including the Wellcome Foundation. In addition, the Europeana Foundation has recently announced the development of a hosting service that will be open for all its member GLAMs in Europe.

At the heart of IIIF is the idea that images will increasingly be delivered as a service, rather than as single monolithic files. So mobile devices will seek dynamically requestable image sizes; while for large images such as maps, or panoramas, or the very large museum-quality scans increasingly being offered to Commons, viewers seek just the individual part being zoomed into rather than having to transfer the whole image at full resolution. This is done using a standardised URL scheme, that is consistent from one website to another, rather than each site's own idiosyncratic syntax; thus also making it easy for tools to bring together details of such images from different websites, allowing for example different versions of the same painting to be minutely compared and contrasted. For users too, rather than having to crop out a detail that they are interested in and then upload it as a new file on some different perhaps completely unconnected server to show it, it becomes possible to define particular crops or rotations on the existing image and publish them simply as URIs, incidentally keeping connection with all the original image's metadata, and all its existing web of links across the internet. IIIF defines a consistent standard for all of this, so that a free choice of different servers and different viewers and different tools can all interact. (On top of which, there is also a developing standard for image metadata, and image collections).

The talk will demonstrate some of the tools and some of the projects that are already basing themselves on IIIF, discuss some of the current server options, and examine the possibilities for interaction and mash-ups that could be opened up if Commons also added a consistent IIIF interface to allow IIIF access.

Track: Technology, Interface & Infrastructure; GLAM Outreach

Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long): 30 minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: Unsure

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Ocaasi (talk) 18:20, 3 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
--Daniel Mietchen (talk) 09:28, 31 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
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