Corresponding author: Roger Hyam (
Academic editor:
Many of the world’s natural history collections are creating high resolution digital images of their specimens. They often make these available on the web through some form or zoomable viewer. For historical reasons, a hotchpotch of technologies are used to achieve this. This diversity has lead to two issues. Firstly, maintenance becomes costly as technologies need replacing. Secondly there is little chance to share data between institutions or provide a unified user experience. A researcher visiting four different virtual collections may have four very different experiences.
Similar issues exist in the archives and libraries disciplines. They also need to share high resolution, annotated images of the physical objects in their care. In response to this issue many have coalesced around the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF).
IIIF is a set of shared application programming interface (API) specifications for interoperable functionality in digital image repositories. It separates the notion of a viewer, which may be used as part of a website or other application, and the web services that feed data to that viewer. By using a common API for serving data about images, different viewers can be used to view the same images, thus providing an upgrade path that does not require replacement of viewer and server software at the same time and allows different viewers to be used for the same image data. Potentially more importantly, it facilitates the construction of applications that view data from different collections as if they were in the same place. From the researcher’s point of view, the experience could be the same whether the virtual specimen is hosted locally or in a museum on another continent.
There is one important thing that has been deliberately omitted from the IIIF standard. This has both enabled its rapid adoption but also makes it incomplete for building research applications. IIIF transmits no semantic data about the subject of the images, only labels. The IIIF data therefore needs to be bound to semantically rich data about the specimens being viewed, in some uniform way.
Consortium of Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF
Roger Hyam
Biodiversity Next 2019
European Commission:SYNTHESYS+
Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
No conflicts
European Commission:SYNTHESYS+
Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
No conflicts