1. IIIF Image Sharing & Collaboration:
A Case Study from the
Reformation to Restoration Project,
Yale Center for British Art
Michael Appleby, Associate Director, Academic Software Development, ITS
Edward Town, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Yale Center for British Art
Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass, Collections Data Manager, Yale Center for British Art
#YaleTechSummit2015
20. Presentation API
• Manifest describes an object
• Canvas describes a page or view
• Sequences indicate page view order
• Images and annotations reference the canvas
26. Partner Organizations
• ARTstor
• Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Bavarian State Library)
• Biblissima
• Bodleian Libraries, Oxford University
• University of British Columbia
• British Library
• e-codices – Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland
• Cornell University
• Digirati Ltd
• Harvard University
• Johns Hopkins University
• Klokan Technologies
• La Bibliothèque nationale de France
• National Library of Austria
• DPLA
• Europeana
• Internet Archive
And many more!
• Nasjonalbiblioteket (National Library of Norway)
• National Library of Denmark
• National Library of Israel
• National Library of New Zealand
• National Library of Poland
• National Library of Serbia
• National Library of Wales
• Princeton University Library
• St. Louis University
• Stanford University
• TextGrid
• text & bytes
• Wellcome Trust
• Yale University
27. Left: Early English water-colour drawings by great masters, C.Geoffrey Holme and Alexander Joseph Finberg, London 1919.
https://archive.org/details/earlyenglishwate00holmuoft
Right: Venice, Mouth of the Grand Canal, J.M.W. Turner, ca. 1840, Yale Center for British Art
28. Michael Appleby
Associate Director, Education and Cultural
Technology,
Yale University ITS
michael.appleby@yale.edu
@mikeapps
Thanks to my colleagues at Stanford, Princeton, and Cornell:
Ben Albritton @bla222, Tom Cramer @tcramer, Rob Sanderson @azaroth42, Stu
Snydman @stusnydman, Jon Stroop @jpstroop, and Simeon Warner @zimeon
for content
29. Image sharing & collaboration
A case study from the Reformation to Restoration project at the
Yale Center for British Art
Edward Town, Postdoctoral Research Associate
Jessica David, Associate Paintings Conservator
30. Screen shot from the Making Art in Tudor Britain online project database available on the National Portrait Gallery, London’s
website:
http://www.npg.org.uk/research/programmes/making-art-in-tudor-britain/matbsearch.php
31. Formerly attr. Steven van der Meulen, Portrait
of a Woman, 1567, oil on panel, 92.7 x 73 cm,
YCBA
Portrait of ‘The Fair Geraldine’ (Elizabeth
FitzGerald 1527-1590), ca. 1565, oil on
panel, 46 x 34 cm,
National Gallery of Ireland
NGI.1195
Susan Bertie, 1567, oil on panel,
48.5 x 35.9 cm, Private
Portrait of a Lady [version of Elizabeth FitzGerald],
ca. 1565, oil on panel, 44.5 x 32 cm, Sale, Sotheby's,
London, Mrs. Randolph Berens and Other
Collections, June 25, 1924, lot 72 (from "various
owners") (as by "Marc Geerarts").
32. Sir Thomas Knyvet, 4th Baron Berners (1539-1616), ca.
1565, oil on panel, 99.1 x 71.7 cm, Compton Verney,
Warwickshire
William Dauntesey,. 1566, oil on panel, 94.3 x 73.7
cm, Agecroft Hall, Virginia
Edward Lyttelton,. 1568, oil on panel, 82.6 x 53.3 cm,
Hagley Hall, Worcestershire, Viscount Cobham
Sir Richard Knightley, 1568, oil on panel, 86.4 x
63.5 cm, Unknown Collection
33. Portrait of Thomas Butler, 10th Earl of Ormonde (1532-
1614), ca. 1565, oil on panel, 93 x 68 cm, National Gallery
of Ireland
Sir Thomas Tresham, 1568, 90.8 x 68.6 cm, oil on
panel, Duke of Buccleuch and Queensbury,
Boughton House, Northamptonshire
John Farnham, Gentleman-Pensioner
to Elizabeth I, 1563, 110.5 x 83 cm, oil
on panel, Worcester Art Museum, MA
called Sir John Constable, 1569, oil on
panel, 82.5 x 58 cm, Burton Constable
Hall
Sir Charles Somerset, 1566, oil on panel,
dimensions unknown, The Duke of Beaufort,
Badminton House, Gloucestershire
Sir Charles Somerset, 1566, oil on panel,
dimensions unknown, The Duke of
Beaufort, Badminton House,
Gloucestershire
34. Dr William Warton, 1561, oil on panel,
78.7 x 63.5 cm, Sir Edmund Bacon
Baronet, Raveningham Hall, Norfolk
called Eleanor Benlowes, 1565, oil on panel, 88
x 63.5 cm, St John's College, Cambridge
William Cecil, Lord Burghley, 1573, oil on panel, 93.7
x 71.2 cm, Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House,
Hertfordshire
Portrait of a gentleman,, 1564, oil on panel,
86.3 x 66 cm, Unknown Location
Unknown Man, 1564, oil on panel, 76.2 x 63.
5 cm, exhibited Cornation Exhibition Ispwich
1953, lent by J. H. Poley
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
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41.
42.
43. IIIF and the YCBA’s Digital Strategy
Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass
Collections Data Manager
Yale Technology Summit 2015
44. Open Access policy
Data exchange standards and
protocols
Open source tools
Linked Open Data
Yale Center for British Art’s
Digital Strategy:
Use technology
to make collections
as accessible as possible
Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass Yale Technology Summit 2015
47. YCBA’s
Implementation
of the
Yale Open Access
Policy
for works in the
public domain
No authorization required
No fees due to the YCBA/Yale
Commercial purposes allowed
Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass Yale Technology Summit 2015
48. Access through
machine readable format
• OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol
for Metadata Harvesting)
• LIDO XML (Lightweight Information
Describing Works of Art)
• OCLC’s open source COBOAT &
OAICatMuseum
Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass Yale Technology Summit 2015
49. Access through
machine readable format
• Linked Open Data semantic endpoint
• CIDOC-CRM (Conceptual Reference
Model)
Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass Yale Technology Summit 2015
50. Access through
machine readable format
What is Linked Open Data?
A method for publishing structured,
linked, and open data using standard
Web technologies such as HTTP,
RDF (Resource Description
Framework) and URIs.
The role of the Conceptual Reference
Model ontology is to harmonize the
semantic relationships created between
things, people, places, events, times,
and concepts from multiple datasets.
Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass Yale Technology Summit 2015
51. Benefits of the CIDOC-CRM
- Data enrichment: the ability to increase the value
of structured data
- Data harmonization: the ability to integrate data
from different sources
- Computer reasoning and inference: the ability
to use computers to help with analysis and
interpretation
CRM fully supports knowledge representation
CRM fully supports YCBA’s goal to contribute the
highest quality research data possible to the
network
Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass Yale Technology Summit 2015
52. • Supports interoperability between image repositories
• Leverages YCBA’s open access resources
• Mirador: open source image viewer
• Originally conceived by Stanford University & now
actively developed by an international community
• Yale (YCBA/Beinecke/ITS) Core Founding Member
since May 2015
• Adopts the principles of Linked Data and the
architecture of the Web in order to provide a
distributed and interoperable system
Benefits of IIIF
Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass Yale Technology Summit 2015
53. Share our digital resources in formats that allow for easy
creative and scholarly reuse so that we can contribute to
the study of British Art worldwide
YCBA semantic endpoint
ResearchSpace: Mellon funded collaborative environment
for humanities and cultural heritage research using
knowledge representation and Semantic Web
technologies
Goal
Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass Yale Technology Summit 2015
My colleagues have explained in much detail what IIIF is and how it is supporting this important research project at the Center. My intent in the next few minutes is to give you an overview of the YCBA digital strategy and how the IIIF technology fits in it.
First let me start by saying that the Yale Center for British is committed to using technology to make its collections as widely accessible as possible and this digital strategy is supported by 4 critical elements:
Open Access policy
Data exchange standards and protocols
Open source tools
Linked Open Data
In the next few minutes I will show how IIIF checks all these boxes.
As you know the Centers’ collections data is exposed via the web in human readable format through our online collections catalog. This catalog allows users to search and view documents as well as images through the web and on mobile devices.
Thousands of images of works in the Center’s collection believed to be in the public domain are available for free through the Center’s online collection catalogue, which will soon be BlackLight.
The green box shown here is where users choose the image sizes they can download free of charge.
Indeed, since 2011, under Yale University’s Open Access Policy, anyone may use the Center’s open access material without further application, authorization, or fees due to the Center or to Yale, that includes commercial purposes and high resolution images. (The Yale policy specifically addresses works in the public domain, and doesn’t address works under copyright.)
The YCBA implemented this policy with a great degree of openness, which was quite groundbreaking in 2011.
“I think we were one of, if not the first, to offer a completely straightforward, no strings attached hi-res download and to have a policy that placed no commercial or credit restrictions on usage whatsoever.” – Melissa Fournier, YCBA
But the website is the tip of the iceberg for us. We also disseminate our digital resources in a programmatic fashion, which is more efficient when dealing with large data aggregators, such as Google and Artstor or even Yale’s own Cross-Collections Discovery service. How did we do that? We contributed our dataset via the OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) data exchange protocol called following an international XML metadata harvesting schema called LIDO.
Both LIDO and OAI-PMH are community developed standards and work with the open source software that were designed by CoggApp for OCLC Online Computer Library Center. It is worth mentioning that YCBA’s David Parsell reconfigured COBOAT to work for LIDO since COBOAT was originally configured to work with CDWA Lite.
Machine readable data can also be accessed querying our Linked Open Data semantic endpoint. As many other cultural heritage institutions, the Center has been digitizing its collections for quite some time (cataloguing and imaging) but unlike many others, at least in the United States, it has taken the additional step to organize its data with an ontology called the CIDOC-Conceptual Reference Model. The CRM has been developed over many years, and is still developed by a community of active cultural heritage institutions practitioners, and is supported by the International Council of Museums’ Committee of Documentation (ICOM CIDOC).
As a side note here I would like to say that we use LIDO as a transport mechanism but the CRM represents the knowledge that the Center outputs much better and we will see why in a minute.
So let’s look very briefly what are LOD and the CRM.
Per Tim Berners-Lee, Linked Open Data is a method of publishing structured, linked, and open data using standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs.
Resource Description Framework is the format used to express statements in LOD.
But LOD could be used in any which way. Rather, as always when the Center publishes data out, we leverage community developed standards, and in this case we use the semantic framework of the CRM because it has been developed specifically for the cultural heritage sector.
How does the CRM work? The role of the CRM ontology is to harmonize the relationships created between things, people, places, events, times, and concepts across multiple datasets.
The CRM is not a metadata schema, and does not require changing of cataloguing practices or controlled vocabularies. It seats above all of that as a more generic semantic framework that allows creating meaningful connections between data entities.
So why is the CRM so important? Why didn’t we chose Google’s Schema.org as our ontology?
Data enrichment: the ability to increase the value of structured data
Data harmonization: the ability to integrate data from different sources
Computer reasoning and inference: the ability to use computers to help with analysis and interpretation
CRM fully supports knowledge representation
CRM fully supports YCBA’s goal to contribute the highest quality research data possible to the network
I am glad to report that IIIF and the Mirador image viewer measure up to our high standards and tick all the boxes of our digital strategy:
In terms of open access policy, IIIF not only supports interoperability between image repositories and breaks down the barriers between image databases/silos but it also leverages our open access resources. A note here to thank Melissa Fournier, YCBA’s Manager Imaging Services and Intellectual Property, whose forward thinking management of our digital assets was the crucial foundation for the Center’s adoption of IIIF, especially where Jpeg2000 are concerned.
It is an international standard actively developed by an active community
It works with a variety of image viewers, Mirador being an open source one.
And finally it outputs Linked Open Data, which, as you now know, has become a cornerstone of our digital strategy to correctly represent our scholarly content for the semantic web environment. The principles of Linked Data and the architecture of the Web are adopted in order to provide a distributed and interoperable system. (The Shared Canvas data model is leveraged in a specific, JSON based format that is easy to implement without understanding RDF, but is still compatible with it. As such it can be seen as a recommended serialization profile for Shared Canvas.)
Our goal is to share our digital resources in formats that allow for easy creative and scholarly reuse so that we can contribute to the study of British Art worldwide. In addition to our semantic endpoint we plan on contributing our RDF dataset to the Mellon funded ResearchSpace.