1. IIIF for Natural Science Applications

IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) is a framework mainly developed by libraries and museums for browsing digitized cultural heritage images, and it is expected that natural science is another important field for its application. Browsing high resolution images is also an important task in natural science, and the challenge is to generalize the specification of IIIF to reflect needs in the field.

In the case of Himawari-8 / Himawari-9 high resolution images, one image is as large as 11,000 pixels by 11,000 pixels, and the archive already stores more than 50,000 images in one year's operation. To tackle this problem, we extended IIIF Curation Viewer, developed by ROIS-DS Center for Open Science in the Humanities. We proposed the extension of IIIF specifications, such as Timeline API and Cursor API, and provided reference implementation. This is Weather Satellite 'Himawari' Viewer, which is to browse a large spatio-temporal image archive smoothly in a multi-resolution manner.

The same mechanism can be applied to the domain where large-scale images are popular. Remote sensing images and camera images are of course included, but also images taken for diagnosis in the medical domain. It is expected that use cases in those domains will increase in the future.

2. Services Using IIIF

3. References (Complete List)

  1. Asanobu KITAMOTO, "IIIF-compliant multi-resolution access to spatio-temporal data and its application to Himawari-8 data", Abstracts of Japan Geoscience Union (JpGU) Meeting 2017, No. MGI30-09, 2017-5 (in Japanese) [ Abstract ]
  2. Asanobu KITAMOTO, "Curation of Himawari-8/9 high resolution satellite images using IIIF Curation Viewer", Abstracts of Japan Geoscience Union (JpGU) Meeting 2018, No. MGI26-09, 2018-5 (in Japanese) [ Abstract ]