International Image Interoperability Framework Research Articles

Thoughts on a Decade of Fragments, Reconstructions, and IIIF

Abstract: Digital image interoperability has helped to fuel the growth of interest in, and emerging practices to support, areas of fragmentology devoted to reunification and aggregation. From early thought-experiments hypothesizing the possibility of regathering the dispersed Ege fragments through non-interoperable static websites and finally to re-usable digitally resequenced manuscripts, this essay traces the driving use-cases that led to the development of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) and that protocol’s current role in digital fragment studies. The author reflects on the state of the field after nearly a decade of IIIF use and development, offers cautionary thoughts for both current software design and data modeling practices, and suggests potential strategies for ensuring long-term sustainability for the scholarly outputs of digital reconstruction projects.

Progress with Repository-based Annotation Infrastructure for Biodiversity Applications

Progress with Repository-based Annotation Infrastructure for Biodiversity Applications

Community Curation of Nomenclatural and Taxonomic Information in the Context of the Collection Management System JACQ

Nomenclatural and taxonomic information are crucial for curating botanical collections. In the course of changing methods for systematic and taxonomic studies, classification systems changed considerably over time (Dalla Torre and Harms 1900, Durand and Bentham 1888, Endlicher 1836, Angiosperm Phylogeny Group et al. 2016). Various approaches to store preserved material have been implemented, most of them based on scientific names (e.g., families, genera, species) often in combination with other criteria such as geographic provenance or collectors. The collection management system, JACQ, was established in the early 2000s then developed to support multiple institutions. It features a centralised data storage (with mirror sites) and access via the Internet. Participating collections can download their data at any time in a comma-separated values (CSV) format. From the beginning, JACQ was conceived as a collaboration platform for objects housed in botanical collections, i.e., plant, fungal and algal groups. For these groups, various sources of taxonomic reference exist, nowadays online resources are preferred, e.g., Catalogue of Life, AlgaeBase, Index Fungorum, Mycobank, Tropicos, Plants of the World Online, International Plant Names Index (IPNI), World Flora Online, Euro+Med, Anthos, Flora of Northamerica, REFLORA, Flora of China, Flora of Cuba, Australian Virtual Herbarium (AVH). Implementation and (re)use of PIDs Persistent identifiers (PIDs) for names (at any taxonomic rank) apart from PIDs for taxa, are essential to allow and support reliable referencing across institutions and thematic research networks (Agosti et al. 2022). For this purpose we have integrated referencing to several of the above mentioned resources and populate the names used inside JACQ with those external PIDs. For example, Salix rosmarinifolia is accepted in Plants of the World Online while Euro+Med Plantbase considers it a synonym of Salix repens subsp. rosmarinifolia. Either one can be an identification of a specimen in the JACQ database. Retrieval of collection material One strong use case is the curation of material in historic collections. On the basis of outdated taxon concepts that were applied to the material in history, "old" synonyms are omnipresent in historical collections. In order to retrieve all material of a given taxon, it is necessary to know all relevant names. Future outlook In combination with the capability of Linked Data and the IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) technology, these PIDs serve as crucial elements for the integration of decentralized information systems and reuse of (global) taxonomic backbones in combination with collection management systems (Gamer and Kreyenbühl 2022, Hyam 2022, Loh 2017).

:Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet

:<i>Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet</i>

Цифровая трансформация письменного наследия тибетского буддизма: состояние и перспективы

Introduction. Making public knowledge pertaining to Buddhist culture proves important and topical enough due to the steady growth of global significance attributed to East and Central Asia. Therefore, insights into monuments of Buddhist heritage represented in vast collections of Russia — at advanced academic and technological levels with an emphasis on the active use of digital technologies — shall yield solutions to quite a number of sociocultural development problems, and strengthen positions of our nation in Asia’s geopolitical environments. Goals. The study aims at analyzing the current state of the art in digitization of Tibetan Buddhism’s written heritage and assessing some promising AI related technologies development trends. Materials and methods. The study provides a comparative analysis of activities by the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) consortium, an oldest and most successful initiatives operating since 1999, for advanced approaches in this field. The use of artificial intelligence methods to solve the problem of creating a machine-readable text corpus of Buddhist writings and machine translation is considered as a promising direction. Results. The work discloses key principles of digitization and representation of written monuments implemented on the new digital platform BUDA (Buddhist Digital Archives), shows effectiveness of the underlying IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) and LOD (Linked Open Data) architectures. The efforts to assess artificial intelligence technologies prospects included a pilot study on the use of ‘deep learning’ neural network methods to create an experimental model for optical recognition of Tibetan characters which yielded a result of 94 % of recognized characters. This lays a foundation for flow-line decoding of Tibetan-language scans and creating a comprehensive corpus of Buddhist writings in a machine-readable format, which offers the challenge of developing new efficient digital textual tools. Conclusions. The integration of existing and promising approaches allows for a digital transformation of Buddhist written traditions, the latter to open new functioning forms and development opportunities in the contemporary world backed with a possibility to reveal the cultural and intellectual potential of Buddhist civilization for modern society to the full.

Цифровая трансформация письменного наследия тибетского буддизма: состояние и перспективы

Introduction. Making public knowledge pertaining to Buddhist culture proves important and topical enough due to the steady growth of global significance attributed to East and Central Asia. Therefore, insights into monuments of Buddhist heritage represented in vast collections of Russia — at advanced academic and technological levels with an emphasis on the active use of digital technologies — shall yield solutions to quite a number of sociocultural development problems, and strengthen positions of our nation in Asia’s geopolitical environments. Goals. The study aims at analyzing the current state of the art in digitization of Tibetan Buddhism’s written heritage and assessing some promising AI related technologies development trends. Materials and methods. The study provides a comparative analysis of activities by the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) consortium, an oldest and most successful initiatives operating since 1999, for advanced approaches in this field. The use of artificial intelligence methods to solve the problem of creating a machine-readable text corpus of Buddhist writings and machine translation is considered as a promising direction. Results. The work discloses key principles of digitization and representation of written monuments implemented on the new digital platform BUDA (Buddhist Digital Archives), shows effectiveness of the underlying IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) and LOD (Linked Open Data) architectures. The efforts to assess artificial intelligence technologies prospects included a pilot study on the use of ‘deep learning’ neural network methods to create an experimental model for optical recognition of Tibetan characters which yielded a result of 94 % of recognized characters. This lays a foundation for flow-line decoding of Tibetan-language scans and creating a comprehensive corpus of Buddhist writings in a machine-readable format, which offers the challenge of developing new efficient digital textual tools. Conclusions. The integration of existing and promising approaches allows for a digital transformation of Buddhist written traditions, the latter to open new functioning forms and development opportunities in the contemporary world backed with a possibility to reveal the cultural and intellectual potential of Buddhist civilization for modern society to the full.

The Age of Datum or Data as a Methodological Paradigm

ABSTRACT This article illustrates how, like photography in the late nineteenth century, data often possesses an alluring appearance of objectivity which gives it affordance. It reflects on how data has altered methods of investigations and, while rejecting its use as a mere indexical trace of information that leads to unequivocal conclusions, advocates for the humanist’s intervention in directing how data is collected, prepared, used, and displayed. The article explores and illustrates three platforms: MediaWiki and its applications, including the Semantic Web; IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework), a tool designed to replicate traditional image-comparative methodologies within a digital realm; and FromThePage, a text transcript platform. Finally, the conundrum of web archiving and data preservation is analysed, to reflect on how data has marked a paradigm shift in our perception, expectations, and understanding of methodologies in the humanities.

Dawne zbiory Uniwersytetu Lwowskiego jako część cyfrowego GLAM

The subject of the analysis are archival materials collected in two descriptions, constituting personal matters of employees of the former University of Lviv (Archival description of the 5th team 26 and archival description of the 1st team P-119). Digital copies of these resources are part of the digital GLAM, digital services created at the University of Wrocław, based on the cooperation of various institutions (archives, libraries, museums and archives) that make their digital collections available using a standardized description and presentation. Institutions that are part of GLAM use in the digital space, among others the IIIF standard (International Image Interoperability Framework), a standard that enables dynamic sharing of digitized digital objects, as well as the Virtual Transcription Laboratory (WLT), a cloudbased tool that allows you to create a text layer as a result of automatic recognition (OCR) or by manualy transcription tools. The article presents both tools, intended to create digital text based on scans, which can then be used to prepare digital objects in various standards: eBook, TEI and in others digital scientific tools.

Having Your Cake and Eating It Too: JSON-LD as an RDF serialization format

One impediment to the uptake of linked data technology is developers’ unfamiliarity with typical Resource Description Framework (RDF) serializations like Turtle and RDF/XML. JSON for Linking Data (JSON-LD) is designed to bypass this problem by expressing linked data in the well-known Javascript Object Notation (JSON) format that is popular with developers. JSON-LD is now Google’s preferred format for exposing Schema.org structured data in web pages for search optimization, leading to its widespread use by web developers. Another successful use of JSON-LD is by the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), which limits its use to a narrow design pattern, which is readily consumed by a variety of applications. This presentation will show how a similar design pattern has been used in Audubon Core and with Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) controlled vocabularies to serialize data in a manner that is both easily consumed by conventional applications, but which also can be seamlessly loaded as RDF into triplestores or other linked data applications. The presentation will also suggest how JSON-LD might be used in other contexts within TDWG vocabularies, including with the Darwin Core Resource Relationship terms.

Understanding IIIF image usage based on server log analysis

Abstract Numerous libraries and museums have adopted the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) that promotes mutual use of images among different institutions. In a IIIF-compatible digital collection, images are retrieved via IIIF Image API (Application Programming Interface), wherein regions of images can be specified. Thus, it is possible to investigate image usage in detail by examining the image regions that have been requested. In this article, we propose a log analysis method to measure the image usage and to visualize the analysis outcomes. Specifically, we employ the number of accesses to each pixel and visualize the results using heat maps. Given that a pixel is the smallest image unit, we apply herein a fine-grained analysis. The analysis method can be used in different applications including research tools in which researchers examine images and heat maps that show which regions of the images have already been examined by collaborators.

International Image Interoperability Framework: A unified approach to sharing images of natural history specimens?

Researchers have become accustomed to online access to data about specimens held in natural history collections. Over several decades, metadata standards have been developed to facilitate the sharing and aggregation of this data, notably Darwin Core and ABCD (Access to Biological Collections Data) developed under the auspices of TDWG but other standards developed in other communities, have also proved useful notably EML (Ecological Metadata Language) and GML (Geography Markup Language). Data aggregators have arisen to both, drive standards development and take advantage of the vast number of records made available through this community effort. Examples include Atlas of Living Australia and spin off Atlas projects, EoL (Encyclopedia of Life), iDigBio, Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), WFO (World Flora Online). There are still many “dark specimens” that are not visible to the web and efforts continue to digitise metadata on these objects and make them available. The vast majority of the data that has been liberated so far, has therefore been text based and the standards reflect this, although many institutions and projects are also producing large numbers of images and other media. There have been media extensions to some standards to accommodate the sharing of images and other multimedia formats. However, these are restricted to metadata about media objects rather than the exchange of media objects themselves. For example, two extensions to Darwin Core are Audubon Core, which is designed to “determine whether a particular resource or collection will be fit for some particular biodiversity science application before acquiring the media.” and the Simple Multimedia extension, which is a “simple extension for exchanging metadata about multimedia resources”. Therefore image exchange, in particular, has not used open standards. Projects have relied on transferring high resolution versions of images (e.g. submission of type specimen images to JSTOR) or cut down compressed versions (e.g. many herbarium specimens submitted to GBIF or Europeana). The network has not allowed access to high resolution versions of images as curated by the host institutions themselves beyond basic links to web pages. If high resolution images have been published in online catalogues, they have been made available using a hotchpotch of different technologies including the now defunct Java Applets and Adobe Flash player. The network has not supported different views of the same specimen or annotations of those views, or integration of audio and moving images. In an ideal world a researcher should be able to view and annotate images of specimens held across multiple collections in a unified way, and the host institutions should have access to those annotations and statistics on how their specimens are being used. How can we achieve this? The sharing of multimedia representations of objects online is not a problem unique to the biodiversity community. Scholars in museums and archives of all kinds are facing the same issues. In 2011 the British Library, Stanford University, the Bodleian Libraries (Oxford University), the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Nasjonalbiblioteket (National Library of Norway), Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library, and Cornell University came together to develop an exchange standard called IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework). This framework now consists of six APIs (Application Programming Interface), four stable and two in beta, to publish and integrate image and other multimedia resources in a uniform manner and has been adopted by many institutions and commercial partners in the digital humanities. Applications based on IIIF enable many of the features desired by biodiversity researchers. The notion of sharing and annotating specimen images is not new to the natural history community. MorphBank, founded in 1998, has grown to allow much of this desirable functionality but at the cost and fragility of being a centralised database. The question we should perhaps be asking is: how can we make the biodiversity data sharing network as a whole more like MorphBank? From 2019 to 2021, part of the EU-funded Synthesys+ programme will support the adoption of IIIF as a unified way to publish images of natural history specimens. We aim to have a set of exemplar institutions publishing IIIF manifests for some millions of specimens by the end of the project and one or more demonstration applications in place. We hope this will act as a catalyst for wider adoption in the natural history community. A key goal is to integrate image data served using IIIF with metadata available via CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities) specimen identifiers. If IIIF were ubiquitous in the natural history community, building tools that implemented this functionality would be feasible. A brief demonstration of a herbarium specimen browser, Herbaria Mundi, will be given. It will illustrate how specimens hosted in different institutions can be manipulated in a single interface. The architecture that supports this behaviour will be explained and its challenges, by implementing the institutions discussed.

Herbaria Mundi: An image centric approach to manipulation of specimens from multiple collections

Addressing the challenges of the Climate Emergency and the Biodiversity Crisis requires us to understand how the world's vegetation is changing. This is not a trivial task,especially in highly diverse tropical areas. Frequently, the only way to characterise vegetation is to make voucher specimens of the plants present and identify them later in the lab. Fortunately there are extensive reference collections carefully curated in herbaria. Unfortunately specimens and expertise are dispersed over hundreds of different herbaria spread across many countries. It would be more efficient if scientists could see and manipulate specimens independently of where they are stored, especially as travel becomes more difficult due to both the need to reduce carbon emissions and virus spread. Herbaria Mundi is an application demonstrating how how this can be achieved using CETAF Specimen IDs and IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework). The application mimics the way a botanist might work in a physical herbarium by enabling the gathering of specimens into groups and side-by-side comparison of specimens, but differs in that one can search for and manipulate specimens in multiple herbaria as if they were stored in a single collection. Voucher specimens are often not added to herbaria mainly because they do not add enough value to material already in the collections. Herbaria Mundi therefore includes the ability for researchers to upload specimen images to Zenodo and for them to appear in the user interface as if they were in an institutional herbarium. This proof of concept application is being developed as part of Task 4.3 of the Synthesys+ project funded by the European Commission. Two things need to occur to take this concept into production. More herbaria need to adopt the use of CETAF specimen identifiers and the IIIF image API. Botanists need to prioritise which features they would like developed first. More herbaria need to adopt the use of CETAF specimen identifiers and the IIIF image API. Botanists need to prioritise which features they would like developed first. The poster will be a catalyst to discuss how these things can be achieved.

Strategies for Assembling the Biodiversity Knowledge Graph

This talk explores different strategies for assembling the “biodiversity knowledge graph” (Page 2016). The first is a centralised, crowd-sourced approach using Wikidata as the foundation. Wikidata is becoming increasingly attractive as a knowledge graph for the life sciences (Waagmeester et al. 2020), and I will discuss some of its strengths and limitations, particularly as a source of bibliographic and taxonomic information. For example, Wikidata’s handling of taxonomy is somewhat problematic given the lack of clear separation of taxa and their names. A second approach is to build biodiversity knowledge graphs from scratch, such as OpenBioDiv (Penev et al. 2019) and my own Ozymandias (Page 2019). These approaches use either generalised vocabularies such as schema.org, or domain specific ones such as TaxPub (Catapano 2010) and the Semantic Publishing and Referencing Ontologies (SPAR) (Peroni and Shotton 2018), and to date tend to have restricted focus, whether geographic (e.g., Australian animals in Ozymandias) or temporal (recent taxonomic literature, OpenBioDiv). A growing number of data sources are now using schema.org to describe their data, including ORCID and Zenodo, and efforts to extend schema.org into biology (Bioschemas) suggest we may soon be able to build comprehensive knowledge graphs using just schema.org and its derivatives. A third approach is not to build an entire knowledge graph, but instead focus on constructing small pieces of the graph tightly linked to supporting evidence, for example via annotations. Annotations are increasingly used to mark up both the biomedical literature (e.g., Kim et al. 2015, Venkatesan et al. 2017) and the biodiversity literature (Batista-Navarro et al. 2017). One could argue that taxonomic databases are essentially lists of annotations (“this name appears in this publication on this page”), which suggests we could link literature projects such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) to taxonomic databases via annotations. Given that the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) provides a framework for treating publications themselves as a set of annotations (e.g., page images) upon which other annotations can be added (Zundert 2018), this suggests ways that knowledge graphs could lead directly to visualising the links between taxonomy and the taxonomic literature. All three approaches will be discussed, accompanied by working examples.

Conceptual design blueprint for the DiSSCo digitization infrastructure - DELIVERABLE D8.1

Conceptual design blueprint for the DiSSCo digitization infrastructure - DELIVERABLE D8.1

Nieuw bibliothekenproject mmmonk ontsluit monastieke manuscripten via iiif

Abstract Mmmonk stands for Medieval monastic manuscripts – open – network – knowledge. It is a collaborative project between Bruges Public Library, Ghent University Library, the Major Seminary Ten Duinen in Bruges and the Diocese of Ghent. The project has been awarded grants from the Flemish Government (Department of Culture, Youth and Media). The project aims to provide digital access to the c. 760 extant medieval manuscripts of the abbeys of Ten Duinen, Ter Doest, Saint Peter’s and Saint Bavo’s. The images and metadata of the manuscripts will be gathered and presented on the mmmonk platform in a sustainable and open manner using the International Image Interoperability Framework (iiif). The platform will gather existing knowledge, present educational content, and encourage further research on the monastic manuscripts. mmmonk will contribute to the development and implementation of iiif for complex book materials.

FAIR Principles for Digital Repositories: Essence and Applications for Heritage Objects

The emergence of the FAIR initiative in 2016 is based on the need for good management of disparate data, and improving the functionality of digital repositories and e-infrastructures. The aim is to promote the re-use of (scientific) data, a need recognized by academia, industry, funding agencies and memory institutions. This paper discusses the nature of the FAIR principles, its` technologies, the concept of FAIR digital object, FAIR ecosystem and persistent identifiers, a possible solution to the images-publication in scientific publications and in museum digital repositories through the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), and all these through the focus of possible digital vision of the Bulgarian memory institutions. Keywords: FAIR principles, heritage, Persistent Identifiers, LOD

Semantically Linking Specimens and Images

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 ) specimen identifiers are now widely adopted by natural history collections in Europe. Each individual collection object is designated by a URI chosen and maintained by the institution owning the specimen (Groom et al. 2017, Güntsch et al. 2018, Güntsch et al. 2017, HYAM et al. 2012). Under Linked Data conventions, content negotiation is used at the server so that users accessing an object using a web-browser are redirected to a human-readable representation of the object, typically a web-page, whilst software systems requiring machine-processable representations are redirected to an RDF-encoded metadata record. CETAF specimen identifiers are therefore ideal partners for IIIF representations of specimens. But how should we join the two together in a semantically rich way that will be generally understandable? SYNTHESYS+ is a European Commission funded programme that facilitates collaboration and network building among European natural history collections. It is concerned with both physical and virtual access to the 390 million specimens of plants and animals housed in participating institutions. Under Task 4.3 of this project, we have been working to create a reliable way to link between the RDF metadata about specimens and images of those specimens in IIIF as well as from images of specimens back to metadata of those specimens. By January 2021, we aim to have ten exemplar institutions publishing IIIF manifest files linked to CETAF identifiers for a few million specimens and for this to act as a catalyst for wider adoption in the natural history community. This presentation gives an update on the rollout of these implementations, paying particular attention to the challenges of semantically annotating specimens with images.

Text-mining BHL: towards new interfaces to the biodiversity literature

The taxonomic literature is one of the largest resources of information on biodiversity, both current and in the past. Unlike many scientific disciplines this literature remains perpetually relevant as successive taxonomic work builds upon those earlier foundations. Projects such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) have greatly increased access to that literature, as have numerous independent digitisation efforts by museums, herbaria, and publishers. But the focus of this access has been human readers, with limited use of text mining tools, mostly focussed on extracting taxonomic names. This talk explores other kinds of data that can be extracted from text on BHL and elsewhere, focusing on taxonomic names, geographic localities and specimen codes in the context of the BioStor project (https://biostor.org, Page 2011). The problem of finding taxonomic names in text has been well studied (e.g., Akella et al. 2012), and new BHL content is continuously indexed by names. Despite this, there is only weak linkage between taxonomic name databases and BHL. Even projects that create these links (e.g., BioNames, Page 2013) do not enable links in the reverse direction. In other words, a BHL reader is unaware whether the appearance of a name on a page is the first publication of that name, nor are they told of the fate of a name in subsequent research. The absence of these links reduces the value of BHL to working taxonomists. In addition to taxonomic names, a typical taxonomic paper often contains specimen codes. Extracting these from text and linking them to digital representations, such as occurrence records in GBIF, opens up the possibility to provide detailed provenance for occurrence data, as well as citation-based metrics for the utility of natural history collections. Taxonomic papers are also often rich in geographic information. A simple method for extracting locality information from text is to search for latitude and longitude coordinates, and BioStor currently does this. To date some 83,000 individual point localities have been extracted (Fig. 1 ). These are used to provide a simple geographic search interface in BioStor, and are also harvested by JournalMap (Karl et al. 2013). But these localities are not linked to the original location in the source text, nor are they linked to any associated specimens, so they cannot be interpreted as occurrences that could be harvested by GBIF. If the goal is to contribute to GBIF then we need tools that can parse locality information and link that to associated specimens. A general framework for handling data on taxonomic names, specimens, and geographic localities in text is to treat them as annotations (Batista-Navarro et al. 2017). By modelling annotations using the Web Annotation Data Model (https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/ ) we can incorporate these annotations into biodiversity knowledge graphs (Page 2016). We can also combine these annotations with new standards for describing digitised content, such as the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF, https://iiif.io). The implications of this approach for developing new interfaces to the biodiversity literature will be discussed.

Standardized Reflection Transformation Imaging (RTI) for Documentation and Research

Reflection Transformation Imaging (RTI) is a powerful tool to capture the surface of an object for later examination [1]. We brought RTI to the next level regarding reproducibility, simplicity and image quality [2]. Besides the possibility to capture the surface topography, we can measure and reproduce materials composed of complex reflectance behaviours, with high colour and gloss fidelity. Full-featured cross-platform software for the creation and viewing of such enhanced RTIs has been developed and commercialized. The application allows simple interaction and comparison of RTI datasets. However, the crucial feature of RTIs is their interactivity and the possibility to individualize viewing configurations for specific surface examinations. In the context of image interoperability, it is essential to be able to describe such viewing configurations to ensure reproducibility, e.g.in case of collaborative work. The trend of linked open data shows that RTIs as well must follow open access rules. The success of standardized access to image data is demonstrated well by the international image interoperability framework (IIIF). In this paper, we address two issues: The importance of standardized web-access to RTI data as well as an approach to store and disseminate specific RTI viewing configurations.

Digital Library Polona: Digitization, Technology, Cooperation

ABSTRACTThe Digital Library Polona, the digital counterpart of the National Library of Poland, is one of the leading digital libraries in Europe. Its long-term strategies are providing open access to the best quality scans, providing satisfactory user experience, and keeping up with technological progress in the field. Polona formed collaborative partnerships with several institutions to strengthen digital humanities. These include Wikipedia, Europeana (“Europeana Collections,” https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en (accessed May 2, 2019)) and the International Image Interoperability Framework Consortium (IIIF-C) (“IIIF Consortium – IIIF, International Image Interoperability Framework,” https://iiif.io/community/consortium/#the-iiif-consortium (accessed May 2, 2019)). In this article, the collections and history of Polona are discussed as well as future prospects for development.