International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) : Enabling Richer Access to the World's Images

A growing community of the world’s leading research libraries and image repositories have embarked on an effort to collaboratively produce an interoperable technology and community framework - - The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) - - for image delivery.
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The IIIF encompasses a large and growing community of interested individuals and organizations and a Consortium (IIIF Consortium or IIIF-C) of institutions dedicated to leading and sustaining the IIIF.

IIIF has the following goals:

  • To give scholars an unprecedented level of uniform & rich access to image-based resources hosted around the world.
  • To define a set of common application programming interfaces that support interoperability between image repositories.
  • To develop, cultivate and document shared technologies, such as image servers and web clients, that provide a world-class user experience in viewing, comparing, manipulating and annotating images.

As a community-driven initiative, IIIF:

  • thrives on active discussion, input, and feedback from a wide array of diverse individuals from libraries, museums, cultural heritage institutions, software firms, and other organizations working with digital images and audio/visual materials;
  • welcomes any organization or individual interested in adopting the IIIF, developing software to support it, or giving feedback on the effort to GET INVOLVED.  

From the technical point of view, IIIF 

is a set of shared application programming interface (API) specifications for interoperable functionality in digital image repositories.

Using JSON-LD for linking data, linked data, and standard W3C web protocols such as Web Annotation, IIIF:

  • makes it easy to parse and share digital image data, migrate across technology systems, and provide enhanced image access for scholars and researchers;
  • enables better, faster and cheaper image delivery;
  • leverages interoperability and the fabric of the Web to access new possibilities and new users for your image-based resources, while reducing long term maintenance and technological lock in;
  • gives users a rich set of baseline functionality for viewing, zooming, and assembling the best mix of resources and tools to view, compare, manipulate and work with portable–shareable, citable, and embeddable images on the Web.

Other benefits of IIIF.

HERE you will find a quick-start guide for image repository managers and engineers who are interested in making their image repository interoperable, or just experimenting with IIIF.

Source : IIIF

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