Image Server IIPImage now supports Zoomify

Zoomify tiles are very popular for publishing old maps and other historical documents - it is the easiest way of publishing of large scanned images on the web. Also, the free Flash based Zoomify Viewer looks very nice. Zoomify works with directory structure which contains image tiles and accompanying XML. You can just upload it all to a server and you have your image online. Zoomify tiles are going to be supported in all our tools for georeferencing and searching of old maps.

Now you can also use the freely available image server IIPImage to deliver tiles from your TIFF files on demand, but still use the same viewer. This way the data from your digital repository can be used both for long-term digital preservation and also for online publishing.

IIPImage support for JPEG2000 format as the source raster image is scheduled for the next year by our grant.

IIPImage is quite easy to setup on your server which runs UNIX or Windows (now Microsoft IIS is supported too).

The default Zoomify viewer with tiles generated by IIPImage:

Fullscreen version of the same viewer

Behaviour for the user is practically identical to the images served from small static files from the disk. IIPImage has support for cashing and is already a mature project, used for example in labs of Louvre in Paris.

Your image is at the same time available also by an IIP protocol, therefore you can also use the native clients supporting this protocol. One of the best such viewers is a very nice AJAX based IIPMooViewer.

Development of Zoomify extension was done with our funding by Ruven Pillay, maintainer and developer of the IIPImage. Source code is now available in IIPImage SVN at SourceForge. It is going to appear in next stable version.

Note: a project j2ktilerenderer is also generating Zoomify tiles - from JPEG2000.

OpenLayers support for Zoomify - first version

OpenLayers is an open-source JavaScript based mapping client a la Google Maps.

OpenLayers can display several map sources, like maps from Google Maps, Yahoo, Microsoft Live Maps as well as from any WMS compatible map server. Therefore you can combine maps from different sources, you can even create and modify vector features or sketch on top of the maps - just like when you create your own maps in Google My Maps.

We have extended OpenLayers project with functionality needed to display Zoomify tiles (source code of this patch is here).

Simple example displaying Zoomify tiles in OpenLayers is in our code repository:

http://oldmapsonline.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/openlayers/examples/zoomify.html

(we will improve this patch - it's loading is very slow for now as OpenLayers is not merged into one file and it is not compressed)

This is the core functionality of our planned georeference tool (GUI prototype), which will allow anyone to generate georeference metadata for already published maps: especially those published as zoomify tiles, TMS Tiles or through a WMS standard from a MapServer.