Mobilizing Annotations with IIIF
While annotations on MorphoSource are powerful when used entirely within MorphoSource, they are designed to be usable across a variety of contexts, even outside of the repository. To make our content viewable and accessible in other views and platforms, we make use of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). IIIF is an open standard for delivering high-quality attributed digital objects with annotations and context online, and it is used by an international community of academic and non-academic institutions, museums, libraries, and other organizations.
Every preview asset on MorphoSource is represented by a IIIF Presentation display manifest document that describes how to present that asset. These IIIF manifests allow preview assets hosted on MorphoSource to be accessed and displayed by other viewers and platforms created by other entities. IIIF manifests also include crucial context describing the media they relate to and any physical object that media represents. And even more, our presentation manifests include any persisted initial rotation or annotation data associated with that media!
Media 000658129, which is used as an example elsewhere in our annotation documentation, has saved annotations that any viewer of the media page will see. By clicking the share button in the bottom left corner on the preview, you can click the IIIF button to bring up the IIIF presentation manifest for this media, which is located at:
https://www.morphosource.org/manifests/c255adf9-f3ee-49b0-b8ea-7cb64b670343
The URL for this manifest is stable and can be used reliably in downstream applications or content. We also have an API route for finding the IIIF manifest URL for any media on MorphoSource.
Presentation manifests for MorphoSource media conform to IIIF Presentation API version 4 for 3D content. Manifests describe a 3D scene with models painted into the scene as annotation items - in the IIIF context, practically all content items are annotations! - with initial model rotation specified. MorphoSource label annotations are included with the 3D scene as IIIF commenting annotations, with per-annotation positioning and camera views.
We also make IIIF Presentation API version 3 manifests available, although these are more useful for 2D image and AV content. By appending manifests/v3/ to the manifest URL instead of just manifests/, you can find our version 3 format manifest documents. The version 3 format of the manifest for media 000658129 is located at:
https://www.morphosource.org/manifests/v3/c255adf9-f3ee-49b0-b8ea-7cb64b670343