International Image Interoperability Framework

An Introduction to IIIFTom Crane#IIIF @tomofhernehill

Digirati Ltd @digirati_uk

Swedish National Heritage Board, Stockholm, 11 March

Who am I?

• Technology Director of Digirati • https://medium.com/digirati-ch

• One of the editors of the IIIF specifications

• Chair of the IIIF AV Technical Specification Group

What is IIIF?

20+ years of digitisation

Common themes…

• Book readers/viewers/page turners

• Deep Zoom

• Transcriptions, OCR, full text

• Annotation, comments, content creation related to the object

• Linking to other objects

• Some bespoke format for delivering a sequence of images to a bespoke viewer

But…

Can this be standardised, and interoperable?

• Use cases for IIIF…

Digital Surrogate

I still have my cultural awareness when looking at a digital surrogate

…but the computer needs assistance in presenting that digital surrogate to me

It needs to be mediated by metadata that can drive a viewing experience so my human cultural awareness can take over again

IIIF: Two Core APIs

“get pixels” via a simple, RESTful, web service

Just enough metadata to drive a remote viewing experience

Image API Presentation API

• Descriptive metadata doesn’t help us get pixels on screen• Read the pages

• Look at the brush strokes

• See the film grain

• IIIF Presentation provides • A model for describing digital representations of objects

• A format for software - viewing tools, annotation clients, web sites - to consume and render the objects and the statements made about them

• The model defines a shared abstract space and time for assembling this content

IIIF is founded on Shared Canvas and the W3C Web Annotation Model

What is a canvas?

It’s where we assemblecontent in IIIF

It’s an abstraction of a view of an object

Essentially, a coordinate system for placement of images and text, and for targeting annotations

Familiar concept of annotation

IIIF Concept

{"@id": "https://wellcomelibrary.org/iiif/b22031261/canvas/c0","@type": "sc:Canvas","width": 10000,"height": 15000,...

}

Same canvas, multiple images

Biblissima: MSS of Francehttp://demos.biblissima-condorcet.fr/chateauroux/

Many views => many canvases

A manifest is a sequence of views

A viewer loads the manifest and renders the views

https://wellcomelibrary.org/iiif/b28769454/manifest

As well as manual addition of annotation content, machines can make them too.

The biggest source of machine annotations is straightforward OCR

Machine processesalso add content

Here, natural language processing is identifying entities, which can then be used by humans to tag and find other content.

Humans and machines can collaborate

Summary

(0,0)

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Publishers provide canvases

All content is placed onthe canvas throughannotations

Images, text – from the publisher and from anyone else

SomeDescription

of the Thing

What is IIIF?

International Image ???Interoperability Framework

But we have AV!

Canvases can now have duration(0,0)

(3110, 2102)

🕐

• This canvas has a mixture of image, video and text annotations, targeting different regions of the x,y space and different extents of the canvas duration.

• The user interface gives the user control of the canvas time

International Image Interoperability Framework

…thanks!Tom Crane#IIIF @tomofhernehill

Digirati Ltd @digirati_uk

Swedish National Heritage Board, Stockholm, 11 March