What is IIIF?

The International Image Interoperability Framework is an image access protocol that addresses many of the needs of visual assets in the humanities field. IIIF offers a standardized way of handling images and their collections: their dissemination through URIs.

Images

A IIIF image is accessible and above all "configurable" through its URI, which supports a set of arguments to manipulate it:

In the example above, following the order of the arguments, from the point 90 pixels in width and length, the upper left corner of a 790 pixel square region is selected. This section is resized to 200 pixels wide, rotated 90° to the right and finally served in a monochrome (bitonal) display in jpg format.

Original full image:  https://iiif.unige.ch/iiif/2/fedora_ug550133/full/full/0/default.jpg
Image with the arguments applied: https://iiif.unige.ch/iiif/2/fedora_ug550133/90,90,790,790/200,/90/bitonal.jpg

Images collection / Compact representation of visual documents - Manifests

Often, a single image is not sufficient to properly represent a work of art such as a collection of letters, an entire book, or a set of photos from an excavation site. IIIF provides a standardized way to share and organize a set of digital images through manifests. A manifest is a JSON file which is accessible through a URL just like the images it describes. This JSON file contains both the different links of the IIIF images ordered according to the natural order of the document they compose, and the different contextual metadata related to this document (such as its publication/creation date, textual transcripts, place of origin, etc.). This manifest can be interpreted by web applications such as Mirador, Universal Viewer or OpenSeaDragon, which allow the display and navigation of the different images contained in a manifest alongside their metadata. As an example, here is a Spanish poem composed of 8 scans loaded in Mirador:  (full screen access link)

Collection of collections (Manifest of manifests)

The concept of manifests as defined by IIIF can also be scaled up to the level of corpora. In essence, this permits the structure of manifests of manifests. As an example, here is how Mirador proposes a navigation through the set of sculpture molds of the University's Gypsotheque project: (lien d'accès en plein écran)

IIIF & RDF

IIIF is a perfect match for RDF, as both formats share the URL expression of assets, allowing images or document collections to be referenced directly in the metadata via their manifest URL. The example below shows how a work of art and its semantic name in RDF is linked to its graphical representation through its URL:

For more informations about RDF, please refer to this page.