Presentation API 3.0

Status of this Document

This Version: 3.0.0

Latest Stable Version: 3.0.0

Previous Version: 2.1.1

Editors:

Copyright © 2012-2024 Editors and contributors. Published by the IIIF Consortium under the CC-BY license, see disclaimer.


1. Introduction

Access to digital representations of objects is a fundamental requirement for many research activities, for the transmission of cultural knowledge, and for the daily pursuits of every web citizen. Ancient scrolls, paintings, letters, books, newspapers, films, operas, albums, field recordings, and computer generated animations are compound objects: they can have many parts, and complex structures. These resources may also bear the written or spoken word, and this linguistic content is often as important as the visual or audible representation.

Collections of both digitized physical objects and much born-digital content benefit from a standardized description of their structure, layout, and presentation mode. This document specifies this standardized description of the collection or compound object, using a JSON format. Many different rich and dynamic user experiences can be implemented, presenting content from across collections and institutions.

A compound object may comprise a series of pages, surfaces, or extents of time; for example the single view of a painting, the two sides of a photograph, four cardinal views of a statue, the many pages of an edition of a newspaper or book, or the duration of an act of an opera. This specification addresses how to provide an order for these views or extents, the references to the resources needed to present them, and the descriptive information needed to allow the user to understand what is being seen or heard.

The principles of Linked Data and the Architecture of the Web are adopted in order to provide a distributed and interoperable framework. The Shared Canvas data model and JSON-LD are leveraged to create an easy-to-implement, JSON-based format.

Please send feedback to iiif-discuss@googlegroups.com

1.1. Objectives and Scope

The objective of the IIIF (pronounced “Triple-Eye-Eff”) Presentation API is to provide the information necessary to allow a rich, online viewing environment for compound digital objects to be presented to a human user, often in conjunction with the IIIF Image API. This is the sole purpose of the API and therefore descriptive information is given in a way that is intended for humans to read, but not semantically available to machines. In particular, it explicitly does not aim to provide metadata that would allow a search engine to index digital objects.

Implementations of this specification will be able to:

  • display to the user digitized images, video, audio, and other content types associated with a particular physical or born-digital object;
  • allow the user to navigate between multiple views or time extents of the object, either sequentially or hierarchically;
  • display descriptive information about the object, view or navigation structure to provide context to the user;
  • and provide a shared environment in which both publishers and users can annotate the object and its content with additional information.

The following are not in scope:

  • Provision of metadata for harvesting and discovery is not directly supported. Properties to reference further descriptive resources are available, and their use is encouraged.
  • Search within the object, which is described by the IIIF Content Search API.

This document is accompanied by the Presentation API Cookbook, which demonstrates motivating use cases for IIIF and contains examples showing how the objectives may be achieved.

1.2. Terminology

This specification uses the following terms:

  • embedded: When a resource (A) is embedded within an embedding resource (B), the complete JSON representation of resource A is present within the JSON representation of resource B, and dereferencing the URI of resource A will not result in additional information. Example: Canvas A is embedded in Manifest B.
  • referenced: When a resource (A) is referenced from a referencing resource (B), an incomplete JSON representation of resource A is present within the JSON representation of resource B, and dereferencing the URI of resource A will result in additional information. Example: Manifest A is referenced from Collection B.
  • HTTP(S): The HTTP or HTTPS URI scheme and internet protocol.

The terms array, JSON object, number, string, and boolean in this document are to be interpreted as defined by the Javascript Object Notation (JSON) specification.

The key words must, must not, required, shall, shall not, should, should not, recommended, may, and optional in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.

2. Resource Type Overview

The objectives described above require a model in which one can characterize the compound object (via the Manifest resource) and the individual views of the object (Canvas resources). Each view may reference images, audio, video and other content resources to allow it to be rendered appropriately. A compound object may also have sections; for example, a book may have chapters of several pages, or a play might be divided into acts and scenes (Range resources) and there may be groups of such objects (Collection resources). These resource types, along with their properties, make up the IIIF Presentation API.

This section provides an overview of the resource types (or classes) that are used in the specification. They are each presented in more detail in Section 5.

2.1. Defined Types

This specification defines the following resource types:

Data Model

Collection

An ordered list of Manifests, and/or further Collections. Collections allow Manifests and child Collections to be grouped in a hierarchical structure for presentation, which can be for generating navigation, showing dynamic results from a search, or providing fixed sets of related resources for any other purpose.

Manifest

A description of the structure and properties of the compound object. It carries information needed for the client to present the content to the user, such as a title and other descriptive information about the object or the intellectual work that it conveys. Each Manifest usually describes how to present a single compound object such as a book, a statue or a music album.

Canvas

A virtual container that represents a particular view of the object and has content resources associated with it or with parts of it. The Canvas provides a frame of reference for the layout of the content, both spatially and temporally. The concept of a Canvas is borrowed from standards like PDF and HTML, or applications like Photoshop and PowerPoint, where an initially blank display surface has images, video, text and other content “painted” on to it by Annotations, collected in Annotation Pages.

Range

An ordered list of Canvases, and/or further Ranges. Ranges allow Canvases, or parts thereof, to be grouped together in some way. This could be for content-based reasons, such as might be described in a table of contents or the set of scenes in a play. Equally, physical features might be important such as page gatherings in an early book, or when recorded music is split across different physical carriers such as two CDs.

2.2. Additional Types

This specification makes use of types defined in the Web Annotation Data Model specification, in particular the following:

Annotation Page

An ordered list of Annotations that is typically associated with a Canvas but may be referenced from other types of resource as well. Annotation Pages collect and order lists of Annotations, which in turn provide commentary about a resource or content that is part of a Canvas.

Annotation

Annotations associate content resources with Canvases. The same mechanism is used for the visible and/or audible resources as is used for transcriptions, commentary, tags and other content. This provides a single, unified method for aligning information, and provides a standards-based framework for distinguishing parts of resources and parts of Canvases. As Annotations can be added later, it promotes a distributed system in which publishers can align their content with the descriptions created by others. Annotation related functionality may also rely on further classes such as SpecificResource, Choice or Selectors.

Content

Web resources such as images, audio, video, or text which are associated with a Canvas via an Annotation, or provide a representation of any resource.

Annotation Collection

An ordered list of Annotation Pages. Annotation Collections allow higher level groupings of Annotations to be recorded. For example, all of the English translation Annotations of a medieval French document could be kept separate from the transcription or an edition in modern French, or the director’s commentary on a film can be separated from the script.

3. Resource Properties

Most of the properties defined by this specification may be associated with any of the resource types described above, and may have more than one value. Properties relate to the resource with which they are associated, so the label property on a Manifest is the human readable label of the Manifest, whereas the same label property on a Canvas is the human readable label for that particular view.

The requirements for which classes have which properties are summarized in Appendix A.

Other properties are allowed, either via local extensions or those endorsed by the IIIF community. If a client discovers properties that it does not understand, then it must ignore them. See the Linked Data Context and Extensions section for more information about extensions.

This section also defines processing requirements for clients for each of the combinations of class and property. These requirements are for general purpose client implementations that are intended to be used to render the entire resource to the user, and not necessarily for consuming applications with specialized use or individual component implementations that might be used to construct a client. The inclusion of these requirements gives publishers a baseline expectation for how they can expect implementations advertised as compliant with this specification to behave when processing their content.

3.1. Descriptive Properties

These properties describe or represent the resource they are associated with, and are typically rendered to the user.

label

A human readable label, name or title. The label property is intended to be displayed as a short, textual surrogate for the resource if a human needs to make a distinction between it and similar resources, for example between objects, pages, or options for a choice of images to display. The label property can be fully internationalized, and each language can have multiple values. This pattern is described in more detail in the languages section.

The value of the property must be a JSON object, as described in the languages section.

  • A Collection must have the label property with at least one entry.
    Clients must render label on a Collection.
  • A Manifest must have the label property with at least one entry.
    Clients must render label on a Manifest.
  • A Canvas should have the label property with at least one entry.
    Clients must render label on a Canvas, and should generate a label for Canvases that do not have them.
  • A content resource may have the label property with at least one entry. If there is a Choice of content resource for the same Canvas, then they should each have at least the label property with at least one entry.
    Clients may render label on content resources, and should render them when part of a Choice.
  • A Range should have the label property with at least one entry.
    Clients must render label on a Range.
  • An Annotation Collection should have the label property with at least one entry.
    Clients should render label on an Annotation Collection.
  • Other types of resource may have the label property with at least one entry.
    Clients may render label on other types of resource.
{ "label": { "en": [ "Example Object Title" ] } }
metadata

An ordered list of descriptions to be displayed to the user when they interact with the resource, given as pairs of human readable label and value entries. The content of these entries is intended for presentation only; descriptive semantics should not be inferred. An entry might be used to convey information about the creation of the object, a physical description, ownership information, or other purposes.

The value of the metadata property must be an array of JSON objects, where each item in the array has both label and value properties. The values of both label and value must be JSON objects, as described in the languages section.

  • A Collection should have the metadata property with at least one item.
    Clients must render metadata on a Collection.
  • A Manifest should have the metadata property with at least one item.
    Clients must render metadata on a Manifest.
  • A Canvas may have the metadata property with at least one item.
    Clients should render metadata on a Canvas.
  • Other types of resource may have the metadata property with at least one item.
    Clients may render metadata on other types of resource.

Clients should display the entries in the order provided. Clients should expect to encounter long texts in the value property, and render them appropriately, such as with an expand button, or in a tabbed interface.

{
  "metadata": [
    {
      "label": { "en": [ "Creator" ] },
      "value": { "en": [ "Anne Artist (1776-1824)" ] }
    }
  ]
}
summary

A short textual summary intended to be conveyed to the user when the metadata entries for the resource are not being displayed. This could be used as a brief description for item level search results, for small-screen environments, or as an alternative user interface when the metadata property is not currently being rendered. The summary property follows the same pattern as the label property described above.

The value of the property must be a JSON object, as described in the languages section.

  • A Collection should have the summary property with at least one entry.
    Clients should render summary on a Collection.
  • A Manifest should have the summary property with at least one entry.
    Clients should render summary on a Manifest.
  • A Canvas may have the summary property with at least one entry.
    Clients should render summary on a Canvas.
  • Other types of resource may have the summary property with at least one entry.
    Clients may render summary on other types of resource.
{ "summary": { "en": [ "This is a summary of the object." ] } }
requiredStatement

Text that must be displayed when the resource is displayed or used. For example, the requiredStatement property could be used to present copyright or ownership statements, an acknowledgement of the owning and/or publishing institution, or any other text that the publishing organization deems critical to display to the user. Given the wide variation of potential client user interfaces, it will not always be possible to display this statement to the user in the client’s initial state. If initially hidden, clients must make the method of revealing it as obvious as possible.

The value of the property must be a JSON object, that has the label and value properties, in the same way as a metadata property entry. The values of both label and value must be JSON objects, as described in the languages section.

  • Any resource type may have the requiredStatement property.
    Clients must render requiredStatement on every resource type.
{
  "requiredStatement": {
    "label": { "en": [ "Attribution" ] },
    "value": { "en": [ "Provided courtesy of Example Institution" ] }
  }
}
rights

A string that identifies a license or rights statement that applies to the content of the resource, such as the JSON of a Manifest or the pixels of an image. The value must be drawn from the set of Creative Commons license URIs, the RightsStatements.org rights statement URIs, or those added via the extension mechanism. The inclusion of this property is informative, and for example could be used to display an icon representing the rights assertions.

If displaying rights information directly to the user is the desired interaction, or a publisher-defined label is needed, then it is recommended to include the information using the requiredStatement property or in the metadata property.

The value must be a string. If the value is drawn from Creative Commons or RightsStatements.org, then the string must be a URI defined by that specification.

  • Any resource type may have the rights property.
    Clients may render rights on any resource type.
{ "rights": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" }

Machine actionable URIs and links for users
The machine actionable URIs for both Creative Commons licenses and RightsStatements.org right statements are http URIs. In both cases, human readable descriptions are available from equivalent https URIs. Clients may wish to rewrite links presented to users to use these equivalent https URIs.

provider

An organization or person that contributed to providing the content of the resource. Clients can then display this information to the user to acknowledge the provider’s contributions. This differs from the requiredStatement property, in that the data is structured, allowing the client to do more than just present text but instead have richer information about the people and organizations to use in different interfaces.

The organization or person is represented as an Agent resource.

  • Agents must have the id property, and its value must be a string. The string must be a URI that identifies the agent.
  • Agents must have the type property, and its value must be the string “Agent”.
  • Agents must have the label property, and its value must be a JSON object as described in the languages section.
  • Agents should have the homepage property, and its value must be an array of JSON objects as described in the homepage section.
  • Agents should have the logo property, and its value must be an array of JSON objects as described in the logo section.
  • Agents may have the seeAlso property, and its value must be an array of JSON object as described in the seeAlso section.

The value must be an array of JSON objects, where each item in the array conforms to the structure of an Agent, as described above.

  • A Collection should have the provider property with at least one item.
    Clients must render provider on a Collection.
  • A Manifest should have the provider property with at least one item.
    Clients must render provider on a Manifest.
  • Other types of resource may have the provider property with at least one item.
    Clients should render provider on other types of resource.
{
  "provider": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/about",
      "type": "Agent",
      "label": { "en": [ "Example Organization" ] },
      "homepage": [
        {
          "id": "https://example.org/",
          "type": "Text",
          "label": { "en": [ "Example Organization Homepage" ] },
          "format": "text/html"
        }
      ],
      "logo": [
        {
          "id": "https://example.org/images/logo.png",
          "type": "Image",
          "format": "image/png",
          "height": 100,
          "width": 120
        }
      ],
      "seeAlso": [
        {
          "id": "https://data.example.org/about/us.jsonld",
          "type": "Dataset",
          "format": "application/ld+json",
          "profile": "https://schema.org/"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}
thumbnail

A content resource, such as a small image or short audio clip, that represents the resource that has the thumbnail property. A resource may have multiple thumbnail resources that have the same or different type and format.

The value must be an array of JSON objects, each of which must have the id and type properties, and should have the format property. Images and videos should have the width and height properties, and time-based media should have the duration property. It is recommended that a IIIF Image API service be available for images to enable manipulations such as resizing.

  • A Collection should have the thumbnail property with at least one item.
    Clients should render thumbnail on a Collection.
  • A Manifest should have the thumbnail property with at least one item.
    Clients should render thumbnail on a Manifest.
  • A Canvas may have the thumbnail property with at least one item. A Canvas should have the thumbnail property if there are multiple resources that make up the view.
    Clients should render thumbnail on a Canvas.
  • A content resource may have the thumbnail property with at least one item. Content resources should have the thumbnail property with at least one item if it is an option in a Choice of resources.
    Clients should render thumbnail on a content resource.
  • Other types of resource may have the thumbnail property with at least one item.
    Clients may render thumbnail on other types of resource.
{
  "thumbnail": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/img/thumb.jpg",
      "type": "Image",
      "format": "image/jpeg",
      "width": 300,
      "height": 200
    }
  ]
}

A date that clients may use for navigation purposes when presenting the resource to the user in a date-based user interface, such as a calendar or timeline. More descriptive date ranges, intended for display directly to the user, should be included in the metadata property for human consumption. If the resource contains Canvases that have the duration property, the datetime given corresponds to the navigation datetime of the start of the resource. For example, a Range that includes a Canvas that represents a set of video content recording a historical event, the navDate is the datetime of the first moment of the recorded event.

The value must be an XSD dateTime literal. The value must have a timezone, and should be given in UTC with the Z timezone indicator, but may instead be given as an offset of the form +hh:mm.

  • A Collection may have the navDate property.
    Clients may render navDate on a Collection.
  • A Manifest may have the navDate property.
    Clients may render navDate on a Manifest.
  • A Range may have the navDate property.
    Clients may render navDate on a Range.
  • A Canvas may have the navDate property.
    Clients may render navDate on a Canvas.
  • Other types of resource must not have the navDate property.
    Clients should ignore navDate on other types of resource.
{ "navDate": "2010-01-01T00:00:00Z" }
placeholderCanvas

A single Canvas that provides additional content for use before the main content of the resource that has the placeholderCanvas property is rendered, or as an advertisement or stand-in for that content. Examples include images, text and sound standing in for video content before the user initiates playback; or a film poster to attract user attention. The content provided by placeholderCanvas differs from a thumbnail: a client might use thumbnail to summarize and navigate multiple resources, then show content from placeholderCanvas as part of the initial presentation of a single resource. A placeholder Canvas is likely to have different dimensions to those of the Canvas(es) of the resource that has the placeholderCanvas property.

Clients may display the content of a linked placeholder Canvas when presenting the resource. When more than one such Canvas is available, for example if placeholderCanvas is provided for the currently selected Range and the current Manifest, the client should pick the one most specific to the content. Publishers should not assume that the placeholder Canvas will be processed by all clients. Clients should take care to avoid conflicts between time-based media in the rendered placeholder Canvas and the content of the resource that has the placeholderCanvas property.

The value must be a JSON object with the id and type properties, and may have other properties of Canvases. The value of type must be the string Canvas. The object must not have the placeholderCanvas property, nor the accompanyingCanvas property.

  • A Collection may have the placeholderCanvas property.
    Clients may render placeholderCanvas on a Collection.
  • A Manifest may have the placeholderCanvas property.
    Clients may render placeholderCanvas on a Manifest.
  • A Canvas may have the placeholderCanvas property.
    Clients may render placeholderCanvas on a Canvas.
  • A Range may have the placeholderCanvas property.
    Clients may render placeholderCanvas on a Range.
  • Other types of resource must not have the placeholderCanvas property.
    Clients should ignore placeholderCanvas on other types of resource.
{
  "placeholderCanvas": {
    "id": "https://example.org/iiif/1/canvas/placeholder",
    "type": "Canvas",
    "height": 1400,
    "width": 1200
  }
}
accompanyingCanvas

A single Canvas that provides additional content for use while rendering the resource that has the accompanyingCanvas property. Examples include an image to show while a duration-only Canvas is playing audio; or background audio to play while a user is navigating an image-only Manifest.

Clients may display the content of an accompanying Canvas when presenting the resource. As with placeholderCanvas above, when more than one accompanying Canvas is available, the client should pick the one most specific to the content. Publishers should not assume that the accompanying Canvas will be processed by all clients. Clients should take care to avoid conflicts between time-based media in the accompanying Canvas and the content of the resource that has the accompanyingCanvas property.

The value must be a JSON object with the id and type properties, and may have other properties of Canvases. The value of type must be the string Canvas. The object must not have the placeholderCanvas property, nor the accompanyingCanvas property.

  • A Collection may have the accompanyingCanvas property.
    Clients may render accompanyingCanvas on a Collection.
  • A Manifest may have the accompanyingCanvas property.
    Clients may render accompanyingCanvas on a Manifest.
  • A Canvas may have the accompanyingCanvas property.
    Clients may render accompanyingCanvas on a Canvas.
  • A Range may have the accompanyingCanvas property.
    Clients may render accompanyingCanvas on a Range.
  • Other types of resource must not have the accompanyingCanvas property.
    Clients should ignore accompanyingCanvas on other types of resource.
{
  "accompanyingCanvas": {
    "id": "https://example.org/iiif/1/canvas/accompany",
    "type": "Canvas",
    "duration": 180.0
  }
}

3.2. Technical Properties

These properties describe technical features of the resources, and are typically processed by the client to understand how to render the resource.

id

The URI that identifies the resource. If the resource is only available embedded within another resource (see the terminology section for an explanation of “embedded”), such as a Range within a Manifest, then the URI may be the URI of the embedding resource with a unique fragment on the end. This is not true for Canvases, which must have their own URI without a fragment.

The value must be a string, and the value must be an HTTP(S) URI for resources defined in this specification. If the resource is retrievable via HTTP(S), then the URI must be the URI at which it is published. External resources, such as profiles, may have non-HTTP(S) URIs defined by other communities.

The existence of an HTTP(S) URI in the id property does not mean that the URI will always be dereferencable. If the resource with the id property is embedded, it may also be dereferenceable. If the resource is referenced (again, see the terminology section for an explanation of “referenced”), it must be dereferenceable. The definitions of the Resources give further guidance.

  • All resource types must have the id property.
    Clients may render id on any resource type, and should render id on Collections, Manifests and Canvases.
{ "id": "https://example.org/iiif/1/manifest" }
type

The type or class of the resource. For classes defined for this specification, the value of type will be described in the sections below describing each individual class.

For content resources, the value of type is drawn from other specifications. Recommendations for common content types such as image, text or audio are given in the table below.

The JSON objects that appear in the value of the service property will have many different classes, and can be used to distinguish the sort of service, with specific properties defined in a registered context document.

The value must be a string.

  • All resource types must have the type property.
    Clients must process, and may render, type on any resource type.
Class Description
Dataset Data not intended to be rendered to humans directly
Image Two dimensional visual resources primarily intended to be seen, such as might be rendered with an <img> HTML tag
Model A three (or more) dimensional model intended to be interacted with by humans
Sound Auditory resources primarily intended to be heard, such as might be rendered with an <audio> HTML tag
Text Resources primarily intended to be read
Video Moving images, with or without accompanying audio, such as might be rendered with a <video> HTML tag
{ "type": "Image" }
format

The specific media type (often called a MIME type) for a content resource, for example image/jpeg. This is important for distinguishing different formats of the same overall type of resource, such as distinguishing text in XML from plain text.

Note that this is different to the formats property in the Image API, which gives the extension to use within that API. It would be inappropriate to use in this case, as format can be used with any content resource, not just images.

The value must be a string, and it should be the value of the Content-Type header returned when the resource is dereferenced.

  • A content resource should have the format property.
    Clients may render the format of any content resource.
  • Other types of resource must not have the format property.
    Clients should ignore format on other types of resource.
{ "format": "application/xml" }
language

The language or languages used in the content of this external resource. This property is already available from the Web Annotation model for content resources that are the body or target of an Annotation, however it may also be used for resources referenced from homepage, rendering, and partOf.

The value must be an array of strings. Each item in the array must be a valid language code, as described in the languages section.

  • An external resource should have the language property with at least one item.
    Clients should process the language of external resources.
  • Other types of resource must not have the language property.
    Clients should ignore language on other types of resource.
{ "language": [ "en" ] }
profile

A schema or named set of functionality available from the resource. The profile can further clarify the type and/or format of an external resource or service, allowing clients to customize their handling of the resource that has the profile property.

The value must be a string, either taken from the profiles registry or a URI.

  • Resources referenced by the seeAlso or service properties should have the profile property.
    Clients should process the profile of a service or external resource.
  • Other types of resource may have the profile property.
    Clients may process the profile of other types of resource.
{ "profile": "https://example.org/profile/statuary" }
height

The height of the Canvas or external content resource. For content resources, the value is in pixels. For Canvases, the value does not have a unit. In combination with the width, it conveys an aspect ratio for the space in which content resources are located.

The value must be a positive integer.

  • A Canvas may have the height property. If it has a height, it must also have a width.
    Clients must process height on a Canvas.
  • Content resources should have the height property, with the value given in pixels, if appropriate to the resource type.
    Clients should process height on content resources.
  • Other types of resource must not have the height property.
    Clients should ignore height on other types of resource.
{ "height": 1800 }
width

The width of the Canvas or external content resource. For content resources, the value is in pixels. For Canvases, the value does not have a unit. In combination with the height, it conveys an aspect ratio for the space in which content resources are located.

The value must be a positive integer.

  • A Canvas may have the width property. If it has a width, it must also have a height.
    Clients must process width on a Canvas.
  • Content resources should have the width property, with the value given in pixels, if appropriate to the resource type.
    Clients should process width on content resources.
  • Other types of resource must not have the width property.
    Clients should ignore width on other types of resource.
{ "width": 1200 }
duration

The duration of the Canvas or external content resource, given in seconds.

The value must be a positive floating point number.

  • A Canvas may have the duration property.
    Clients must process duration on a Canvas.
  • Content resources should have the duration property, if appropriate to the resource type.
    Clients should process duration on content resources.
  • Other types of resource must not have a duration.
    Clients should ignore duration on other types of resource.
{ "duration": 125.0 }
viewingDirection

The direction in which a set of Canvases should be displayed to the user. This specification defines four direction values in the table below. Others may be defined externally as an extension.

The value must be a string.

  • A Collection may have the viewingDirection property.
    Clients should process viewingDirection on a Collection.
  • A Manifest may have the viewingDirection property.
    Clients should process viewingDirection on a Manifest.
  • A Range may have the viewingDirection property.
    Clients may process viewingDirection on a Range.
  • Other types of resource must not have the viewingDirection property.
    Clients should ignore viewingDirection on other types of resource.
Value Description
left-to-right The object is displayed from left to right. The default if not specified.
right-to-left The object is displayed from right to left.
top-to-bottom The object is displayed from the top to the bottom.
bottom-to-top The object is displayed from the bottom to the top.
{ "viewingDirection": "left-to-right" }
behavior

A set of user experience features that the publisher of the content would prefer the client to use when presenting the resource. This specification defines the values in the table below. Others may be defined externally as an extension.

In order to determine the behaviors that are governing a particular resource, there are four inheritance rules from resources that reference the current resource:

  • Collections inherit behaviors from their referencing Collection.
  • Manifests DO NOT inherit behaviors from any referencing Collections.
  • Canvases inherit behaviors from their referencing Manifest, but DO NOT inherit behaviors from any referencing Ranges, as there might be several with different behaviors.
  • Ranges inherit behaviors from any referencing Range and referencing Manifest.

Clients should interpret behaviors on a Range only when that Range is selected or is in some other way the context for the user’s current interaction with the resources. A Range with the behavior value continuous, in a Manifest with the behavior value paged, would mean that the Manifest’s Canvases should be rendered in a paged fashion, unless the range is selected to be viewed, and its included Canvases would be rendered in that context only as being virtually stitched together. This might occur, for example, when a physical scroll is cut into pages and bound into a codex with other pages, and the publisher would like to provide the user the experience of the scroll in its original form.

The descriptions of the behavior values have a set of which other values they are disjoint with, meaning that the same resource must not have both of two or more from that set. In order to determine which is in effect, the client should follow the inheritance rules above, taking the value from the closest resource. The user interface effects of the possible permutations of non-disjoint behavior values are client dependent, and implementers are advised to look for relevant recipes in the IIIF cookbook.

Future Clarification Anticipated
Further clarifications about the implications of interactions between behavior values should be expected in subsequent minor releases.

The value must be an array of strings.

  • Any resource type may have the behavior property with at least one item.
    Clients should process behavior on any resource type.
Value Description
  Temporal Behaviors
auto-advance Valid on Collections, Manifests, Canvases, and Ranges that include or are Canvases with at least the duration dimension. When the client reaches the end of a Canvas, or segment thereof as specified in a Range, with a duration dimension that has this behavior, it should immediately proceed to the next Canvas or segment and render it. If there is no subsequent Canvas in the current context, then this behavior should be ignored. When applied to a Collection, the client should treat the first Canvas of the next Manifest as following the last Canvas of the previous Manifest, respecting any start property specified. Disjoint with no-auto-advance.
no-auto-advance Valid on Collections, Manifests, Canvases, and Ranges that include or are Canvases with at least the duration dimension. When the client reaches the end of a Canvas or segment with a duration dimension that has this behavior, it must not proceed to the next Canvas, if any. This is a default temporal behavior if not specified. Disjoint with auto-advance.
repeat Valid on Collections and Manifests, that include Canvases that have at least the duration dimension. When the client reaches the end of the duration of the final Canvas in the resource, and the behavior value auto-advance is also in effect, then the client should return to the first Canvas, or segment of Canvas, in the resource that has the behavior value repeat and start playing again. If the behavior value auto-advance is not in effect, then the client should render a navigation control for the user to manually return to the first Canvas or segment. Disjoint with no-repeat.
no-repeat Valid on Collections and Manifests, that include Canvases that have at least the duration dimension. When the client reaches the end of the duration of the final Canvas in the resource, the client must not return to the first Canvas, or segment of Canvas. This is a default temporal behavior if not specified. Disjoint with repeat.
  Layout Behaviors
unordered Valid on Collections, Manifests and Ranges. The Canvases included in resources that have this behavior have no inherent order, and user interfaces should avoid implying an order to the user. Disjoint with individuals, continuous, and paged.
individuals Valid on Collections, Manifests, and Ranges. For Collections that have this behavior, each of the included Manifests are distinct objects in the given order. For Manifests and Ranges, the included Canvases are distinct views, and should not be presented in a page-turning interface. This is the default layout behavior if not specified. Disjoint with unordered, continuous, and paged.
continuous Valid on Collections, Manifests and Ranges, which include Canvases that have at least height and width dimensions. Canvases included in resources that have this behavior are partial views and an appropriate rendering might display all of the Canvases virtually stitched together, such as a long scroll split into sections. This behavior has no implication for audio resources. The viewingDirection of the Manifest will determine the appropriate arrangement of the Canvases. Disjoint with unordered, individuals and paged.
paged Valid on Collections, Manifests and Ranges, which include Canvases that have at least height and width dimensions. Canvases included in resources that have this behavior represent views that should be presented in a page-turning interface if one is available. The first canvas is a single view (the first recto) and thus the second canvas likely represents the back of the object in the first canvas. If this is not the case, see the behavior value non-paged. Disjoint with unordered, individuals, continuous, facing-pages and non-paged.
facing-pages Valid only on Canvases, where the Canvas has at least height and width dimensions. Canvases that have this behavior, in a Manifest that has the behavior value paged, must be displayed by themselves, as they depict both parts of the opening. If all of the Canvases are like this, then page turning is not possible, so simply use individuals instead. Disjoint with paged and non-paged.
non-paged Valid only on Canvases, where the Canvas has at least height and width dimensions. Canvases that have this behavior must not be presented in a page turning interface, and must be skipped over when determining the page order. This behavior must be ignored if the current Manifest does not have the behavior value paged. Disjoint with paged and facing-pages.
  Collection Behaviors
multi-part Valid only on Collections. Collections that have this behavior consist of multiple Manifests or Collections which together form part of a logical whole or a contiguous set, such as multi-volume books or a set of journal issues. Clients might render these Collections as a table of contents rather than with thumbnails, or provide viewing interfaces that can easily advance from one member to the next. Disjoint with together.
together Valid only on Collections. A client should present all of the child Manifests to the user at once in a separate viewing area with its own controls. Clients should catch attempts to create too many viewing areas. This behavior should not be interpreted as applying to the members of any child resources. Disjoint with multi-part.
  Range Behaviors
sequence Valid only on Ranges, where the Range is referenced in the structures property of a Manifest. Ranges that have this behavior represent different orderings of the Canvases listed in the items property of the Manifest, and user interfaces that interact with this order should use the order within the selected Range, rather than the default order of items. Disjoint with thumbnail-nav and no-nav.
thumbnail-nav Valid only on Ranges. Ranges that have this behavior may be used by the client to present an alternative navigation or overview based on thumbnails, such as regular keyframes along a timeline for a video, or sections of a long scroll. Clients should not use them to generate a conventional table of contents. Child Ranges of a Range with this behavior must have a suitable thumbnail property. Disjoint with sequence and no-nav.
no-nav Valid only on Ranges. Ranges that have this behavior must not be displayed to the user in a navigation hierarchy. This allows for Ranges to be present that capture unnamed regions with no interesting content, such as the set of blank pages at the beginning of a book, or dead air between parts of a performance, that are still part of the Manifest but do not need to be navigated to directly. Disjoint with sequence and thumbnail-nav.
  Miscellaneous Behaviors
hidden Valid on Annotation Collections, Annotation Pages, Annotations, Specific Resources and Choices. If this behavior is provided, then the client should not render the resource by default, but allow the user to turn it on and off. This behavior does not inherit, as it is not valid on Collections, Manifests, Ranges or Canvases.
{ "behavior": [ "auto-advance", "individuals" ] }
timeMode

A mode associated with an Annotation that is to be applied to the rendering of any time-based media, or otherwise could be considered to have a duration, used as a body resource of that Annotation. Note that the association of timeMode with the Annotation means that different resources in the body cannot have different values. This specification defines the values specified in the table below. Others may be defined externally as an extension.

The value must be a string.

  • An Annotation may have the timeMode property.
    Clients should process timeMode on an Annotation.
Value Description
trim (default, if not supplied) If the content resource has a longer duration than the duration of portion of the Canvas it is associated with, then at the end of the Canvas’s duration, the playback of the content resource must also end. If the content resource has a shorter duration than the duration of the portion of the Canvas it is associated with, then, for video resources, the last frame should persist on-screen until the end of the Canvas portion’s duration. For example, a video of 120 seconds annotated to a Canvas with a duration of 100 seconds would play only the first 100 seconds and drop the last 20 second.
scale Fit the duration of content resource to the duration of the portion of the Canvas it is associated with by scaling. For example, a video of 120 seconds annotated to a Canvas with a duration of 60 seconds would be played at double-speed.
loop If the content resource is shorter than the duration of the Canvas, it must be repeated to fill the entire duration. Resources longer than the duration must be trimmed as described above. For example, if a 20 second duration audio stream is annotated onto a Canvas with duration 30 seconds, it will be played one and a half times.
{ "timeMode": "trim" }

3.3. Linking Properties

These properties are references or links between resources, and split into external references where the linked object is outside of the IIIF space, and internal references where the linked object is a IIIF resource. Clients typically create a link to the resource that is able to be activated by the user, or interact directly with the linked resource to improve the user’s experience.

homepage

A web page that is about the object represented by the resource that has the homepage property. The web page is usually published by the organization responsible for the object, and might be generated by a content management system or other cataloging system. The resource must be able to be displayed directly to the user. Resources that are related, but not home pages, must instead be added into the metadata property, with an appropriate label or value to describe the relationship.

The value of this property must be an array of JSON objects, each of which must have the id, type, and label properties, should have a format property, and may have the language property.

  • Any resource type may have the homepage property.
    Clients should render homepage on a Collection, Manifest or Canvas, and may render homepage on other types of resource.

Model Alignment
Please note that this specification has stricter requirements about the JSON pattern used for the homepage property than the Web Annotation Data Model. The IIIF requirements are compatible, but the home page of an Agent found might have only a URI, or might be a JSON object with other properties. See the section on collisions between contexts for more information.

{
  "homepage": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.com/info/",
      "type": "Text",
      "label": { "en": [ "Homepage for Example Object" ] },
      "format": "text/html",
      "language": [ "en" ]
    }
  ]
}

A small image resource that represents the Agent resource it is associated with. The logo must be clearly rendered when the resource is displayed or used, without cropping, rotating or otherwise distorting the image. It is recommended that a IIIF Image API service be available for this image for other manipulations such as resizing.

When more than one logo is present, the client should pick only one of them, based on the information in the logo properties. For example, the client could select a logo of appropriate aspect ratio based on the height and width properties of the available logos. The client may decide on the logo by inspecting properties defined as extensions.

The value of this property must be an array of JSON objects, each of which must have id and type properties, and should have format. The value of type must be “Image”.

  • Agent resources should have the logo property.
    Clients must render logo on Agent resources.
{
  "logo": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/img/logo.jpg",
      "type": "Image",
      "format": "image/jpeg",
      "height": 100,
      "width": 120
    }
  ]
}
rendering

A resource that is an alternative, non-IIIF representation of the resource that has the rendering property. Such representations typically cannot be painted onto a single Canvas, as they either include too many views, have incompatible dimensions, or are compound resources requiring additional rendering functionality. The rendering resource must be able to be displayed directly to a human user, although the presentation may be outside of the IIIF client. The resource must not have a splash page or other interstitial resource that mediates access to it. If access control is required, then the IIIF Authentication API is recommended. Examples include a rendering of a book as a PDF or EPUB, a slide deck with images of a building, or a 3D model of a statue.

The value must be an array of JSON objects. Each item must have the id, type and label properties, and should have a format property.

  • Any resource type may have the rendering property with at least one item.
    Clients should render rendering on a Collection, Manifest or Canvas, and may render rendering on other types of resource.
{
  "rendering": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/1.pdf",
      "type": "Text",
      "label": { "en": [ "PDF Rendering of Book" ] },
      "format": "application/pdf"
    }
  ]
}
service

A service that the client might interact with directly and gain additional information or functionality for using the resource that has the service property, such as from an Image to the base URI of an associated IIIF Image API service. The service resource should have additional information associated with it in order to allow the client to determine how to make appropriate use of it. Please see the Service Registry document for the details of currently known service types.

The value must be an array of JSON objects. Each object will have properties depending on the service’s definition, but must have either the id or @id and type or @type properties. Each object should have a profile property.

  • Any resource type may have the service property with at least one item.
    Clients may process service on any resource type, and should process the IIIF Image API service.
{
  "service": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/service",
      "type": "ExampleExtensionService",
      "profile": "https://example.org/docs/service"
    }
  ]
}

For cross-version consistency, this specification defines the following values for the type or @type property for backwards compatibility with other IIIF APIs. Future versions of these APIs will define their own types. These type values are necessary extensions for compatibility of the older versions.

Value Specification
ImageService1 Image API version 1
ImageService2 Image API version 2
SearchService1 Search API version 1
AutoCompleteService1 Search API version 1
AuthCookieService1 Authentication API version 1
AuthTokenService1 Authentication API version 1
AuthLogoutService1 Authentication API version 1

Implementations should be prepared to recognize the @id and @type property names used by older specifications, as well as id and type. Note that the @context key should not be present within the service, but instead included at the beginning of the document. The example below includes both version 2 and version 3 IIIF Image API services.

{
  "service": [
    {
      "@id": "https://example.org/iiif2/image1/identifier",
      "@type": "ImageService2",
      "profile": "http://iiif.io/api/image/2/level2.json"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif3/image1/identifier",
      "type": "ImageService3",
      "profile": "level2"
    }
  ]
}
services

A list of one or more service definitions on the top-most resource of the document, that are typically shared by more than one subsequent resource. This allows for these shared services to be collected together in a single place, rather than either having their information duplicated potentially many times throughout the document, or requiring a consuming client to traverse the entire document structure to find the information. The resource that the service applies to must still have the service property, as described above, where the service resources have at least the id and type or @id and @type properties. This allows the client to know that the service applies to that resource. Usage of the services property is at the discretion of the publishing system.

A client encountering a service property where the definition consists only of an id and type should then check the services property on the top-most resource for an expanded definition. If the service is not present in the services list, and the client requires more information in order to use the service, then it should dereference the id (or @id) of the service in order to retrieve a service description.

The value must be an array of JSON objects. Each object must a service resource, as described above.

  • A Collection may have the services property, if it is the topmost Collection in a response document.
    Clients should process services on a Collection.
  • A Manifest may have the services property.
    Clients should process services on a Manifest.
{
  "services": [
    {
      "@id": "https://example.org/iiif/auth/login",
      "@type": "AuthCookieService1",
      "profile": "http://iiif.io/api/auth/1/login",
      "label": "Login to Example Institution",
      "service": [
        {
          "@id": "https://example.org/iiif/auth/token",
          "@type": "AuthTokenService1",
          "profile": "http://iiif.io/api/auth/1/token"          
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}
seeAlso

A machine-readable resource such as an XML or RDF description that is related to the current resource that has the seeAlso property. Properties of the resource should be given to help the client select between multiple descriptions (if provided), and to make appropriate use of the document. If the relationship between the resource and the document needs to be more specific, then the document should include that relationship rather than the IIIF resource. Other IIIF resources are also valid targets for seeAlso, for example to link to a Manifest that describes a related object. The URI of the document must identify a single representation of the data in a particular format. For example, if the same data exists in JSON and XML, then separate resources should be added for each representation, with distinct id and format properties.

The value must be an array of JSON objects. Each item must have the id and type properties, and should have the label, format and profile properties.

  • Any resource type may have the seeAlso property with at least one item.
    Clients may process seeAlso on any resource type.
{
  "seeAlso": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/library/catalog/book1.xml",
      "type": "Dataset",
      "label": { "en": [ "Bibliographic Description in XML" ] },
      "format": "text/xml",
      "profile": "https://example.org/profiles/bibliographic"
    }
  ]
}
partOf

A containing resource that includes the resource that has the partOf property. When a client encounters the partOf property, it might retrieve the referenced containing resource, if it is not embedded in the current representation, in order to contribute to the processing of the contained resource. For example, the partOf property on a Canvas can be used to reference an external Manifest in order to enable the discovery of further relevant information. Similarly, a Manifest can reference a containing Collection using partOf to aid in navigation.

The value must be an array of JSON objects. Each item must have the id and type properties, and should have the label property.

  • Any resource type may have the partOf property with at least one item
    Clients may render partOf on any resource type.
{ "partOf": [ { "id": "https://example.org/iiif/1", "type": "Manifest" } ] }
start

A Canvas, or part of a Canvas, which the client should show on initialization for the resource that has the start property. The reference to part of a Canvas is handled in the same way that Ranges reference parts of Canvases. This property allows the client to begin with the first Canvas that contains interesting content rather than requiring the user to manually navigate to find it.

The value must be a JSON object, which must have the id and type properties. The object must be either a Canvas (as in the first example below), or a Specific Resource with a Selector and a source property where the value is a Canvas (as in the second example below).

  • A Manifest may have the start property.
    Clients should process start on a Manifest.
  • A Range may have the start property.
    Clients should process start on a Range.
  • Other types of resource must not have the start property.
    Clients should ignore start on other types of resource.
{ "start": { "id": "https://example.org/iiif/1/canvas/1", "type": "Canvas" } }
{
  "start": {
    "id": "https://example.org/iiif/1/canvas-segment/1",
    "type": "SpecificResource",
    "source": "https://example.org/iiif/1/canvas/1",
    "selector": {
      "type": "PointSelector",
      "t": 14.5
    }
  }
}
supplementary

A link from this Range to an Annotation Collection that includes the supplementing Annotations of content resources for the Range. Clients might use this to present additional content to the user from a different Canvas when interacting with the Range, or to jump to the next part of the Range within the same Canvas. For example, the Range might represent a newspaper article that spans non-sequential pages, and then uses the supplementary property to reference an Annotation Collection that consists of the Annotations that record the text, split into Annotation Pages per newspaper page. Alternatively, the Range might represent the parts of a manuscript that have been transcribed or translated, when there are other parts that have yet to be worked on. The Annotation Collection would be the Annotations that transcribe or translate, respectively.

The value must be a JSON object, which must have the id and type properties, and the type must be AnnotationCollection.

  • A Range may have the supplementary property.
    Clients may process supplementary on a Range.
  • Other types of resource must not have the supplementary property.
    Clients should ignore supplementary on other types of resource.
{ "supplementary": { "id": "https://example.org/iiif/1/annos/1", "type": "AnnotationCollection" } }

3.4. Structural Properties

These properties define the structure of the object being represented in IIIF by allowing the inclusion of child resources within parents, such as a Canvas within a Manifest, or a Manifest within a Collection. The majority of cases use items, however there are two special cases for different sorts of structures.

items

Much of the functionality of the IIIF Presentation API is simply recording the order in which child resources occur within a parent resource, such as Collections or Manifests within a parent Collection, or Canvases within a Manifest. All of these situations are covered with a single property, items.

The value must be an array of JSON objects. Each item must have the id and type properties. The items will be resources of different types, as described below.

  • A Collection must have the items property. Each item must be either a Collection or a Manifest.
    Clients must process items on a Collection.
  • A Manifest must have the items property with at least one item. Each item must be a Canvas.
    Clients must process items on a Manifest.
  • A Canvas should have the items property with at least one item. Each item must be an Annotation Page.
    Clients must process items on a Canvas.
  • An Annotation Page should have the items property with at least one item. Each item must be an Annotation.
    Clients must process items on an Annotation Page.
  • A Range must have the items property with at least one item. Each item must be a Range, a Canvas or a Specific Resource where the source is a Canvas.
    Clients should process items on a Range.
  • Other types of resource must not have the items property.
    Clients should ignore items on other types of resource.
{
  "items": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/manifest1",
      "type": "Manifest"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/collection1",
      "type": "Collection"
    }
    // ...
  ]
}
structures

The structure of an object represented as a Manifest can be described using a hierarchy of Ranges. Ranges can be used to describe the “table of contents” of the object or other structures that the user can interact with beyond the order given by the items property of the Manifest. The hierarchy is built by nesting the child Range resources in the items array of the higher level Range. The top level Ranges of these hierarchies are given in the structures property.

The value must be an array of JSON objects. Each item must have the id and type properties, and the type must be Range.

  • A Manifest may have the structures property.
    Clients should process structures on a Manifest. The first hierarchy should be presented to the user by default, and further hierarchies should be able to be selected as alternative structures by the user.
  • Other types of resource must not have the structures property.
    Clients should ignore structures on other types of resource.
{
  "structures": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/range/1",
      "type": "Range",
      "items": [ { ... } ]
    }
  ]
}
annotations

An ordered list of Annotation Pages that contain commentary or other Annotations about this resource, separate from the Annotations that are used to paint content on to a Canvas. The motivation of the Annotations must not be painting, and the target of the Annotations must include this resource or part of it.

The value must be an array of JSON objects. Each item must have at least the id and type properties.

  • A Collection may have the annotations property with at least one item.
    Clients should process annotations on a Collection.
  • A Manifest may have the annotations property with at least one item.
    Clients should process annotations on a Manifest,.
  • A Canvas may have the annotations property with at least one item.
    Clients should process annotations on a Canvas.
  • A Range may have the annotations property with at least one item.
    Clients should process annotations on a Range.
  • A content resource may have the annotations property with at least one item.
    Clients should process annotations on a content resource.
  • Other types of resource must not have the annotations property.
    Clients should ignore annotations on other types of resource.
{
  "annotations": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/annotationPage/1",
      "type": "AnnotationPage",
      "items": [ { ... } ]
    }
  ]
}

3.5. Values

Values for motivation

This specification defines two values for the Web Annotation property of motivation, or purpose when used on a Specific Resource or Textual Body.

While any resource may be the target of an Annotation, this specification defines only motivations for Annotations that target Canvases. These motivations allow clients to determine how the Annotation should be rendered, by distinguishing between Annotations that provide the content of the Canvas, from ones with externally defined motivations which are typically comments about the Canvas.

Additional motivations may be added to the Annotation to further clarify the intent, drawn from extensions or other sources. Clients must ignore motivation values that they do not understand. Other motivation values given in the Web Annotation specification should be used where appropriate, and examples are given in the Presentation API Cookbook.

Value Description
painting Resources associated with a Canvas by an Annotation that has the motivation value painting must be presented to the user as the representation of the Canvas. The content can be thought of as being of the Canvas. The use of this motivation with target resources other than Canvases is undefined. For example, an Annotation that has the motivation value painting, a body of an Image and the target of the Canvas is an instruction to present that Image as (part of) the visual representation of the Canvas. Similarly, a textual body is to be presented as (part of) the visual representation of the Canvas and not positioned in some other part of the user interface.
supplementing Resources associated with a Canvas by an Annotation that has the motivation value supplementing may be presented to the user as part of the representation of the Canvas, or may be presented in a different part of the user interface. The content can be thought of as being from the Canvas. The use of this motivation with target resources other than Canvases is undefined. For example, an Annotation that has the motivation value supplementing, a body of an Image and the target of part of the Canvas is an instruction to present that Image to the user either in the Canvas’s rendering area or somewhere associated with it, and could be used to present an easier to read representation of a diagram. Similarly, a textual body is to be presented either in the targeted region of the Canvas or otherwise associated with it, and might be OCR, a manual transcription or a translation of handwritten text, or captions for what is being said in a Canvas with audio content.

4. JSON-LD Considerations

This section describes features applicable to all of the Presentation API content. For the most part, these are features of the JSON-LD specification that have particular uses within the API.

4.1. Case Sensitivity

Terms in JSON-LD are case sensitive. The cases of properties and enumerated values in IIIF Presentation API responses must match those used in this specification. For example to specify that a resource is a Manifest, the property must be given as type and not Type or tYpE, and the value must be given as Manifest and not manifest or manIfEsT.

4.2. Resource Representations

Resource descriptions should be embedded within the JSON description of parent resources, and may also be available via separate requests from the HTTP(S) URI given in the resource’s id property. Links to resources must be given as a JSON object with the id and type properties and should have format or profile to give a hint as to what sort of resource is being referred to.

{
  "rendering": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/content/book.pdf",
      "type": "Text",
      "label": { "en": [ "Example Book (pdf)" ] },
      "format": "application/pdf"
    }
  ]
}

4.3. Properties with Multiple Values

Any of the properties in the API that can have multiple values must always be given as an array of values, even if there is only a single item in that array.

{
  "thumbnail": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/images/thumb1.jpg",
      "type": "Image",
      "format": "image/jpeg"
    }
  ]
}

4.4. Language of Property Values

Language may be associated with strings that are intended to be displayed to the user for the label and summary properties, plus the label and value properties of the metadata and requiredStatement objects.

The values of these properties must be JSON objects, with the keys being the BCP 47 language code for the language, or if the language is either not known or the string does not have a language, then the key must be the string none. The associated values must be arrays of strings, where each item is the content in the given language.

{
  "label": {
    "en": [
      "Whistler's Mother",
      "Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: The Artist's Mother"
    ],
    "fr": [
      "Arrangement en gris et noir no 1",
      "Portrait de la mère de l'artiste",
      "La Mère de Whistler"
    ],
    "none": [ "Whistler (1871)" ]
  }
}

Note that BCP 47 allows the script of the text to be included after a hyphen, such as ar-latn, and clients should be aware of this possibility.

In the case where multiple values are supplied, clients must use the following algorithm to determine which values to display to the user.

  • If all of the values are associated with the none key, the client must display all of those values.
  • Else, the client should try to determine the user’s language preferences, or failing that use some default language preferences. Then:
    • If any of the values have a language associated with them, the client must display all of the values associated with the language that best matches the language preference.
    • If all of the values have a language associated with them, and none match the language preference, the client must select a language and display all of the values associated with that language.
    • If some of the values have a language associated with them, but none match the language preference, the client must display all of the values that do not have a language associated with them.

Note that this does not apply to embedded textual bodies in Annotations, which use the Web Annotation pattern of value and language as separate properties.

4.5. HTML Markup in Property Values

Minimal HTML markup may be included for processing in the summary property and the value property in the metadata and requiredStatement objects. It must not be used in label or other properties. This is included to allow content publishers to add links and simple formatting instructions to blocks of text. The content must be well-formed XML and therefore must be wrapped in an element such as p or span. There must not be whitespace on either side of the HTML string, and thus the first character in the string must be a ‘<’ character and the last character must be ‘>’, allowing a consuming application to test whether the value is HTML or plain text using these. To avoid a non-HTML string matching this, it is recommended that an additional whitespace character be added to the end of the value in situations where plain text happens to start and end this way.

In order to avoid HTML or script injection attacks, clients must remove:

  • Tags such as script, style, object, form, input and similar.
  • All attributes other than href on the a tag, src and alt on the img tag.
  • All href attributes that start with the strings other than “http:”, “https:”, and “mailto:”.
  • CData sections.
  • XML Comments.
  • Processing instructions.

Clients should allow only a, b, br, i, img, p, small, span, sub and sup tags. Clients may choose to remove any and all tags, therefore it should not be assumed that the formatting will always be rendered. Note that publishers may include arbitrary HTML content for processing using customized or experimental applications, and the requirements for clients assume an untrusted or unknown publisher.

{ "summary": { "en-latn": [ "<p>Short <b>summary</b> of the resource.</p>" ] } }

4.6. Linked Data Context and Extensions

The top level resource in the response must have the @context property, and it should appear as the very first key/value pair of the JSON representation. This tells Linked Data processors how to interpret the document. The IIIF Presentation API context, below, must occur once per response in the top-most resource, and thus must not appear within embedded resources. For example, when embedding a Canvas within a Manifest, the Canvas will not have the @context property.

The value of the @context property must be either the URI http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json or a JSON array with the URI http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json as the last item. Further contexts, such as those for local or registered extensions, must be added at the beginning of the array.

{
  "@context": "http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json"
}

Any additional properties beyond those defined in this specification or the Web Annotation Data Model should be mapped to RDF predicates using further context documents. These extensions should be added to the top level @context property, and must be added before the above context. The JSON-LD 1.1 functionality of predicate specific context definitions, known as scoped contexts, must be used to minimize cross-extension collisions. Extensions intended for community use should be registered in the extensions registry, but registration is not mandatory.

{
  "@context": [
    "http://example.org/extension/context.json",
    "http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json"
  ]
}

The JSON representation must not include the @graph key at the top level. This key might be created when serializing directly from RDF data using the JSON-LD 1.0 compaction algorithm. Instead, JSON-LD framing and/or custom code should be used to ensure the structure of the document is as defined by this specification.

4.7. Term Collisions between Contexts

There are some common terms used in more than one JSON-LD context document. Every attempt has been made to minimize these collisions, but some are inevitable. In order to know which specification is in effect at any given point, the class of the resource that has the property is the primary governing factor. Thus properties on Annotation based resources use the context from the Web Annotation Data Model, whereas properties on classes defined by this specification use the IIIF Presentation API context’s definition.

There is one property that is in direct conflict - the label property is defined by both and is available for every resource. The use of label in IIIF follows modern best practices for internationalization by allowing the language to be associated with the value using the language map construction described above. The Web Annotation Data Model uses it only for Annotation Collections, and mandates the format is a string. For this property, the API overrides the definition from the Annotation model to ensure that labels can consistently be represented in multiple languages.

The following properties are defined by both, and the IIIF representation is more specific than the Web Annotation Data Model but are not in conflict, or are never used on the same resource:

  • homepage: In IIIF the home page of a resource is represented as a JSON object, whereas in the Web Annotation Data Model it can also be a string.
  • type: In IIIF the type is singular, whereas in the Web Annotation Data Model there can be more than one type.
  • format: In IIIF the format of a resource is also singular, whereas in the Web Annotation Data Model there can be more than one format.
  • language: In IIIF the language property always takes an array, whereas in the Web Annotation Data Model it can be a single string.
  • start: The start property is used on a Manifest to refer to the start Canvas or part of a Canvas and thus is a JSON object, whereas in the Web Annotation Data Model it is used on a TextPositionSelector to give the start offset into the textual content and is thus an integer.

The rights, partOf, and items properties are defined by both in the same way.

4.8. Keyword Mappings

The JSON-LD keywords @id, @type and @none are mapped to id, type and none by the Presentation API linked data context. Thus in content conforming to this version of the Presentation API, the only JSON key beginning with @ will be @context. However, the content may include data conforming to older specifications or external specifications that use keywords beginning with @. Clients should expect to encounter both syntaxes.

5. Resource Structure

This section provides detailed description of the resource types used in this specification. Section 2 provides an overview of the resource types and figures illustrating allowed relationships between them, and Appendix A provides summary tables of the property requirements.

5.1. Collection

Collections are used to list the Manifests available for viewing. Collections may include both other Collections and Manifests, in order to form a tree-structured hierarchy. Collections might align with the curated management of cultural heritage resources in sets, also called “collections”, but may have absolutely no such similarity.

The intended usage of Collections is to allow clients to:

  • Load a pre-defined set of Manifests at initialization time.
  • Receive a set of Manifests, such as search results, for rendering.
  • Visualize lists or hierarchies of related Manifests.
  • Provide navigation through a list or hierarchy of available Manifests.

Collections may be embedded inline within other Collections, such as when the Collection is used primarily to subdivide a larger one into more manageable pieces, however Manifests must not be embedded within Collections. An embedded Collection should also have its own URI from which the JSON description is available.

Manifests or Collections may be referenced from more than one Collection. For example, an institution might define four Collections: one for modern works, one for historical works, one for newspapers and one for books. The Manifest for a modern newspaper would then appear in both the modern Collection and the newspaper Collection. Alternatively, the institution may choose to have two separate newspaper Collections, and reference each as a sub-Collection of modern and historical.

Collections with an empty items property are allowed but discouraged. For example, if the user performs a search that matches no Manifests, then the server may return a Collection response with no Manifests.

Collections or Manifests referenced in the items property must have the id, type and label properties. They should have the thumbnail property.

An example Collection document:

{
  "@context": "http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json",
  "id": "https://example.org/iiif/collection/top",
  "type": "Collection",
  "label": { "en": [ "Collection for Example Organization" ] },
  "summary": { "en": [ "Short summary of the Collection" ] },
  "requiredStatement": {
    "label": { "en": [ "Attribution" ] },
    "value": { "en": [ "Provided by Example Organization" ] }
  },

  "items": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/1/manifest",
      "type": "Manifest",
      "label": { "en": [ "Example Manifest 1" ] },
      "thumbnail": [
        {
          "id": "https://example.org/manifest1/thumbnail.jpg",
          "type": "Image",
          "format": "image/jpeg"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Note that while the Collection may reference Collections or Manifests from previous versions of the API, the information included in this document must follow the current version requirements, not the requirements of the target document. This is in contrast to the requirements of service, as there is no way to distinguish a version 2 Manifest from a version 3 Manifest by its type.

5.2. Manifest

The Manifest resource typically represents a single object and any intellectual work or works embodied within that object. In particular it includes descriptive, rights and linking information for the object. The Manifest embeds the Canvases that should be rendered as views of the object and contains sufficient information for the client to initialize itself and begin to display something quickly to the user.

The identifier in id must be able to be dereferenced to retrieve the JSON description of the Manifest, and thus must use the HTTP(S) URI scheme.

The Manifest must have an items property, which is an array of JSON-LD objects. Each object is a Canvas, with requirements as described in the next section. The Manifest may also have a structures property listing one or more Ranges which describe additional structure of the content, such as might be rendered as a table of contents. The Manifest may have an annotations property, which includes Annotation Page resources where the Annotations have the Manifest as their target. These will typically be comment style Annotations, and must not have painting as their motivation.

{
  // Metadata about this manifest file
  "@context": "http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json",
  "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/manifest",
  "type": "Manifest",

  // Descriptive metadata about the object/work
  "label": { "en": [ "Book 1" ] },
  "metadata": [
    {
      "label": { "en": [ "Author" ] },
      "value": { "none": [ "Anne Author" ] }
    },
    {
      "label": { "en": [ "Published" ] },
      "value": {
        "en": [ "Paris, circa 1400" ],
        "fr": [ "Paris, environ 1400" ]
      }
    },
    {
      "label": { "en": [ "Notes" ] },
      "value": {
        "en": [
          "Text of note 1",
          "Text of note 2"
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "label": { "en": [ "Source" ] },
      "value": { "none": [ "<span>From: <a href=\"https://example.org/db/1.html\">Some Collection</a></span>" ] }
    }
  ],
  "summary": { "en": [ "Book 1, written by Anne Author, published in Paris around 1400." ] },

  "thumbnail": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/page1/full/80,100/0/default.jpg",
      "type": "Image",
      "format": "image/jpeg",
      "service": [
        {
          "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/page1",
          "type": "ImageService3",
          "profile": "level1"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],

  // Presentation Information
  "viewingDirection": "right-to-left",
  "behavior": [ "paged" ],
  "navDate": "1856-01-01T00:00:00Z",

  // Rights Information
  "rights": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "requiredStatement": {
    "label": { "en": [ "Attribution" ] },
    "value": { "en": [ "Provided by Example Organization" ] }
  },
  "provider": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/about",
      "type": "Agent",
      "label": { "en": [ "Example Organization" ] },
      "homepage": [
        {
          "id": "https://example.org/",
          "type": "Text",
          "label": { "en": [ "Example Organization Homepage" ] },
          "format": "text/html"
        }
      ],
      "logo": [
        {
          "id": "https://example.org/service/inst1/full/max/0/default.png",
          "type": "Image",
          "format": "image/png",
          "service": [
            {
              "id": "https://example.org/service/inst1",
              "type": "ImageService3",
              "profile": "level2"
            }
          ]
        }
      ],
      "seeAlso": [
        {
          "id": "https://data.example.org/about/us.jsonld",
          "type": "Dataset",
          "format": "application/ld+json",
          "profile": "https://schema.org/"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],

  // Links
  "homepage": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/info/book1/",
      "type": "Text",
      "label": { "en": [ "Home page for Book 1" ] },
      "format": "text/html"
    }
  ],
  "service": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/service/example",
      "type": "ExampleExtensionService",
      "profile": "https://example.org/docs/example-service.html"
    }
  ],
  "seeAlso": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/library/catalog/book1.xml",
      "type": "Dataset",
      "format": "text/xml",
      "profile": "https://example.org/profiles/bibliographic"
    }
  ],
  "rendering": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1.pdf",
      "type": "Text",
      "label": { "en": [ "Download as PDF" ] },
      "format": "application/pdf"
    }
  ],
  "partOf": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/collections/books/",
      "type": "Collection"
    }
  ],
  "start": {
    "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/canvas/p2",
    "type": "Canvas"
  },

  // List of Services, referenced from within items, structures or annotations
  "services": [
    {
      "@id": "https://example.org/iiif/auth/login",
      "@type": "AuthCookieService1",
      "profile": "http://iiif.io/api/auth/1/login",
      "label": "Login to Example Institution",
      "service": [
        {
          "@id": "https://example.org/iiif/auth/token",
          "@type": "AuthTokenService1",
          "profile": "http://iiif.io/api/auth/1/token"          
        }
      ]
    }
  ],

  // List of Canvases
  "items": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/canvas/p1",
      "type": "Canvas",
      "label": { "none": [ "p. 1" ] }
      // ...
    }
  ],

  // structure of the resource, described with Ranges
  "structures": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/range/top",
      "type": "Range"
      // Ranges members should be included here
    }
    // Any additional top level Ranges can be included here
  ],

  // Commentary Annotations on the Manifest
  "annotations": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/annotations/p1",
      "type": "AnnotationPage",
      "items": [
        // Annotations about the Manifest are included here
      ]
    }
  ]
}

5.3. Canvas

The Canvas represents an individual page or view and acts as a central point for assembling the different content resources that make up the display. Canvases must be identified by a URI and it must be an HTTP(S) URI. The URI of the canvas must not contain a fragment (a # followed by further characters), as this would make it impossible to refer to a segment of the Canvas’s area using the media fragment syntax of #xywh= for spatial regions, and/or #t= for temporal segments. Canvases may be able to be dereferenced separately from the Manifest via their URIs as well as being embedded.

Every Canvas should have a label to display. If one is not provided, the client should automatically generate one for use based on the Canvas’s position within the items property.

Content resources are associated with the Canvas via Web Annotations. Content that is to be rendered as part of the Canvas must be associated by an Annotation that has the motivation value painting. These Annotations are recorded in the items of one or more Annotation Pages, referred to in the items array of the Canvas. Annotations that do not have the motivation value painting must not be in pages referenced in items, but instead in the annotations property. Referenced, external Annotation Pages must have the id and type properties.

Content that is derived from the Canvas, such as a manual or automatic (OCR) transcription of text in an image or the words spoken in an audio representation, must be associated by an Annotation that has the motivation value supplementing. Annotations may have any other motivation values as well. Thus, content of any type may be associated with the Canvas via an Annotation that has the motivation value painting, meaning the content is part of the Canvas; an Annotation that has the motivation value supplementing, meaning the content is from the Canvas but not necessarily part of it; or an Annotation with another motivation meaning that it is somehow about the Canvas.

A Canvas must have a rectangular aspect ratio (described with the height and width properties) and/or a duration to provide an extent in time. These dimensions allow resources to be associated with specific regions of the Canvas, within the space and/or time extents provided. Content must not be associated with space or time outside of the Canvas’s dimensions, such as at coordinates below 0,0, greater than the height or width, before 0 seconds, or after the duration. Content resources that have dimensions which are not defined for the Canvas must not be associated with that Canvas by an Annotation that has the motivation value painting. For example, it is valid to use an Annotation that has the motivation value painting to associate an Image (which has only height and width) with a Canvas that has all three dimensions, but it is an error to associate a Video resource (which has height, width and duration) with a Canvas that does not have all three dimensions. Such a resource should instead be referenced using the rendering property, or by Annotations that have a motivation value other than painting in the annotations property.

Parts of Canvases may be described using a Specific Resource with a Selector, following the patterns defined in the Web Annotation data model. The use of the FragmentSelector class is recommended by that specification, as it allows for refinement by other Selectors and for consistency with use cases that cannot be represented using a URI fragment directly. Parts of Canvases can be referenced from Ranges, as the body or target of Annotations, or in the start property.

Parts of Canvases may also be identified by appending a fragment to the Canvas’s URI, and these parts are still considered to be Canvases: their type value is the string Canvas. Rectangular spatial parts of Canvases may also be described by appending an xywh= fragment to the end of the Canvas’s URI. Similarly, temporal parts of Canvases may be described by appending a t= fragment to the end of the Canvas’s URI. Spatial and temporal fragments may be combined, using an & character between them, and the temporal dimension should come first. It is an error to select a region using a dimension that is not defined by the Canvas, such as a temporal region of a Canvas that only has height and width dimensions.

Canvases may be treated as content resources for the purposes of annotating on to other Canvases. For example, a Canvas (Canvas A) with a video resource and Annotations representing subtitles or captions may be annotated on to another Canvas (Canvas B). This pattern maintains the correct spatial and temporal alignment of Canvas A’s content relative to Canvas B’s dimensions.

Renderers must scale content into the space represented by the Canvas, and should follow any timeMode value provided for time-based media. If the Canvas represents a view of a physical object, the spatial dimensions of the Canvas should be the same scale as that physical object, and content should represent only the object.

{
  // Metadata about this canvas
  "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/canvas/p1",
  "type": "Canvas",
  "label": { "none": [ "p. 1" ] },
  "height": 1000,
  "width": 750,

  "items": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/content/p1/1",
      "type": "AnnotationPage",
      "items": [
        // Painting Annotations on the Canvas are included here
      ]
    }
  ],

  "annotations": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/comments/p1/1",
      "type": "AnnotationPage",
      "items": [
        // Non-Painting Annotations on the Canvas are included here
      ]
    }

  ]
}

5.4. Range

Ranges are used to represent structure within an object beyond the default order of the Canvases in the items property of the Manifest, such as newspaper sections or articles, chapters within a book, or movements within a piece of music. Ranges can include Canvases, parts of Canvases, or other Ranges, creating a tree structure like a table of contents.

The intent of adding a Range to the Manifest is to allow the client to display a linear or hierarchical navigation interface to enable the user to quickly move through the object’s content. Clients should present only Ranges that have the label property and do not have a behavior value no-nav to the user. Clients should not render Canvas labels as part of the navigation, and a Range that wraps the Canvas must be created if this is the desired presentation.

If there is no Range that has the behavior value sequence, and the Manifest does not have the behavior value unordered, then the client should treat the order of the Canvases in the Manifest’s items array as the default order. If there is one Range that has the behavior value sequence, then the client must instead use this Range for the ordering. If there is more than one Range that has the behavior value sequence, for example a second Range to represent an alternative ordering of the pages of a manuscript, the first Range should be used as the default and the others should be able to be selected. Ranges that have the behavior value sequence must be directly within the structures property of the Manifest, and must not be embedded or referenced within other Ranges. These Ranges may have limited hierarchical nesting, but clients are not expected to traverse very deep structures in determining the default order. If this Range includes parts of Canvases, then these parts are the content to render by default and would generate separate entries in a navigation display. This allows for the Canvas to include content outside of the default view, such as a color bar or ruler.

Ranges must have URIs and they should be HTTP(S) URIs. Top level Ranges are embedded or externally referenced within the Manifest in a structures property. These top level Ranges then embed or reference other Ranges, Canvases or parts of Canvases in the items property. Each entry in the items property must be a JSON object, and it must have the id and type properties. If a top level Range needs to be dereferenced by the client, then it must not have the items property, such that clients are able to recognize that it should be retrieved in order to be processed.

All of the Canvases or parts that should be considered as being part of a Range must be included within the Range’s items property, or a descendant Range’s items.

The Canvases and parts of Canvases need not be contiguous or in the same order as in the Manifest’s items property or any other Range. Examples include newspaper articles that are continued in different sections, a chapter that starts half way through a page, or time segments of a single canvas that represent different sections of a piece of music.

Ranges may link to an Annotation Collection that has the content of the Range using the supplementary property. The referenced Annotation Collection will contain Annotations that target areas of Canvases within the Range and link content resources to those Canvases.

{
  "@context": "http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json",
  "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/manifest",
  "type": "Manifest",
  // Metadata here ...

  "items": [
    // Canvases here ...
  ],

  "structures": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/range/r0",
      "type": "Range",
      "label": { "en": [ "Table of Contents" ] },
      "items": [
        {
          "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/canvas/cover",
          "type": "Canvas"
        },
        {
          "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/range/r1",
          "type": "Range",
          "label": { "en": [ "Introduction" ] },
          "supplementary": {
            "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/annocoll/introTexts",
            "type": "AnnotationCollection"
          },
          "items": [
            {
              "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/canvas/p1",
              "type": "Canvas"
            },
            {
              "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/canvas/p2",
              "type": "Canvas"
            },
            {
              "type": "SpecificResource",
              "source": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/canvas/p3",
              "selector": {
                "type": "FragmentSelector",
                "value": "xywh=0,0,750,300"
              }
            }
          ]
        },
        {
          "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/canvas/backCover",
          "type": "Canvas"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

5.5. Annotation Page

Association of Images and other content with their respective Canvases is done via Annotations. Traditionally Annotations are used for associating commentary with the resource the Annotation’s text or body is about, the Web Annotation model allows any resource to be associated with any other resource, or parts thereof, and it is reused for both commentary and painting resources on the Canvas. Other resources beyond images might include the full text of the object, musical notations, musical performances, diagram transcriptions, commentary Annotations, tags, video, data and more.

These Annotations are collected together in Annotation Page resources, which are included in the items property from the Canvas. Each Annotation Page can be embedded in its entirety, if the Annotations should be processed as soon as possible when the user navigates to that Canvas, or a reference to an external page. This reference must include id and type, must not include items and may include other properties, such as behavior. All of the Annotations in the Annotation Page should have the Canvas as their target. Clients should process the Annotation Pages and their items in the order given in the Canvas. Publishers may choose to expedite the processing of embedded Annotation Pages by ordering them before external pages, which will need to be dereferenced by the client.

An Annotation Page must have an HTTP(S) URI given in id, and may have any of the other properties defined in this specification or the Web Annotation specification. The Annotations are listed in the items property of the Annotation Page.

Incompatibility Warning
The definition of label in the Web Annotation specification does not produce JSON conformant with the structure defined in this specification for languages. Given the absolute requirement for internationalized labels and the strong desire for consistently handling properties, the label property on Annotation model classes does not conform to the string requirement of the Web Annotation Data Model. This issue has been filed with the W3C and will hopefully be addressed in a future version of the standard.

{
  "@context": "http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json",
  "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/annopage/p1",
  "type": "AnnotationPage",

  "items": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/annopage/p1/a1",
      "type": "Annotation"
      // ...
    },
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/annopage/p1/a2",
      "type": "Annotation"
      // ...
    }
  ]
}

5.6. Annotation

Annotations follow the Web Annotation data model. The description provided here is a summary plus any IIIF specific requirements. The W3C standard is the official documentation.

Annotations must have their own HTTP(S) URIs, conveyed in the id property. The JSON-LD description of the Annotation should be returned if the URI is dereferenced, according to the Web Annotation Protocol.

When Annotations are used to associate content resources with a Canvas, the content resource is linked in the body of the Annotation. The URI of the Canvas must be repeated in the target property of the Annotation, or the source property of a Specific Resource used in the target property.

Note that the Web Annotation data model defines different patterns for the value property, when used within an Annotation. The value of a Textual Body or a Fragment Selector, for example, are strings rather than JSON objects with languages and values. Care must be taken to use the correct string form in these cases.

Additional features of the Web Annotation data model may also be used, such as selecting a segment of the Canvas or content resource, or embedding the comment or transcription within the Annotation. The use of these advanced features sometimes results in situations where the target is not a content resource, but instead a SpecificResource, a Choice, or other non-content object. Implementations should check the type of the resource and not assume that it is always content to be rendered.

The IIIF community has defined additional Selector classes for use with SpecificResources, especially for cases when it is not possible to use the official FragmentSelector. See the additional documentation for details.

{
  "@context": "http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json",
  "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/annotation/p0001-image",
  "type": "Annotation",
  "motivation": "painting",
  "body": {
    "id": "https://example.org/images/page1.jpg",
    "type": "Image"
  },
  "target": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/canvas/p1"
}

5.7. Content Resources

Content resources are external web resources that are referenced from within the Manifest or Collection. This includes images, video, audio, data, web pages or any other format.

As described in the Canvas section, the content associated with a Canvas (and therefore the content of a Manifest) is provided by the body property of Annotations with the painting motivation. Content resources can also be referenced from thumbnail, homepage, logo, rendering, and seeAlso properties.

Content resources must have an id property, with the value being the URI at which the resource can be obtained.

The type of the content resource must be included, and should be taken from the table listed under the definition of type. The format of the resource should be included and, if so, should be the media type that is returned when the resource is dereferenced. The profile of the resource, if it has one, should also be included. Content resources in appropriate formats may also have the language, height, width, and duration properties. Content resources may also have descriptive and linking properties, as defined in section 3.

If the content resource is an Image, and a IIIF Image service is available for it, then the id property of the content resource may be a complete URI to any particular representation supported by the Image Service, such as https://example.org/image1/full/1000,/0/default.jpg, but must not be just the URI of the IIIF Image service. Its type value must be the string Image. Its media type may be listed in format, and its height and width may be given as integer values for height and width respectively. The Image should have the service referenced from it using the service property.

If there is a need to distinguish between content resources, then the resource should have the label property.

A Canvas may be treated as a content resource for the purposes of annotating it on to other Canvases. In this situation, the Canvas may be embedded within the Annotation, or require dereferencing to obtain its description.

{
  "@context": "http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json",
  "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/annotation/p0001-image",
  "type": "Annotation",
  "motivation": "painting",
  "body": {
    "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/page1/full/max/0/default.jpg",
    "type": "Image",
    "label": { "en": [ "Page 1" ], "es": [ "Página 1" ] },
    "format": "image/jpeg",
    "service": [
      {
        "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/page1",
        "type": "ImageService3",
        "profile": "level2",
        "service": [
          {
            "@id": "https://example.org/iiif/auth/login",
            "@type": "AuthCookieService1"
          }
        ]
      }
    ],
    "height": 2000,
    "width": 1500
  },
  "target": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/canvas/p1"
}

5.8. Annotation Collection

Annotation Collections represent groupings of Annotation Pages that should be managed as a single whole, regardless of which Canvas or resource they target. This allows, for example, all of the Annotations that make up a particular translation of the text of a book to be collected together. A client might then present a user interface that allows all of the Annotations in an Annotation Collection to be displayed or hidden according to the user’s preference.

Annotation Collections must have a URI, and it should be an HTTP(S) URI. They should have a label and may have any of the other descriptive, linking or rights properties.

{
  "@context": "http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json",
  "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/annocoll/transcription",
  "type": "AnnotationCollection",
  "label": {"en": ["Diplomatic Transcription"]},

  "first": { "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/annopage/l1", "type": "AnnotationPage" },
  "last": { "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/annopage/l120", "type": "AnnotationPage" }
}

For Annotation Collections with many Annotations, there will be many pages. The Annotation Collection refers to the first and last page, and then the pages refer to the previous and next pages in the ordered list. Each page is part of the Annotation Collection.

{
  "@context": "http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json",
  "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/annopage/l1",
  "type": "AnnotationPage",
  "partOf": {
    "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/annocoll/transcription",
    "type": "AnnotationCollection"
  },
  "next": {
    "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/annopage/l2",
    "type": "AnnotationPage"
  },
  "items": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/annopage/p1/a1",
      "type": "Annotation"
      // ...
    }
  ]
}

6. HTTP Requests and Responses

This section describes the recommended request and response interactions for the API. The REST and simple HATEOAS approach is followed where an interaction will retrieve a description of the resource, and additional calls may be made by following links obtained from within the description. All of the requests use the HTTP GET method; creation and update of resources is not covered by this specification. It is recommended that implementations also support HTTP HEAD requests.

6.1. URI Recommendations

While any HTTP(S) URI is technically acceptable for any of the resources in the API, there are several best practices for designing the URIs for the resources.

  • The URI should use the HTTPS scheme, not HTTP.
  • The URI should not include query parameters or fragments.
  • Once published, they should be as persistent and unchanging as possible.
  • Special characters must be encoded.

6.2. Requests

Clients are only expected to follow links to Presentation API resources. Unlike IIIF Image API requests, or other parameterized services, the URIs for Presentation API resources cannot be assumed to follow any particular pattern.

6.3. Responses

The format for all responses is JSON, as described above. It is good practice for all resources with an HTTP(S) URI to provide their description when the URI is dereferenced. If a resource is referenced within a response, rather than being embedded, then it must be able to be dereferenced.

If the server receives a request with an Accept header, it should respond following the rules of content negotiation. Note that content types provided in the Accept header of the request may include parameters, for example profile or charset.

If the request does not include an Accept header, the HTTP Content-Type header of the response should have the value application/ld+json (JSON-LD) with the profile parameter given as the context document: http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json.

Content-Type: application/ld+json;profile="http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json"

If the Content-Type header application/ld+json cannot be generated due to server configuration details, then the Content-Type header should instead be application/json (regular JSON), without a profile parameter.

Content-Type: application/json

The HTTP server must follow the CORS requirements to enable browser-based clients to retrieve the descriptions. If the server receives a request with one of the content types above in the Accept header, it should respond with that content type following the rules of content negotiation. Recipes for enabling CORS and conditional Content-Type headers are provided in the Apache HTTP Server Implementation Notes.

Responses should be compressed by the server as there are significant performance gains to be made for very repetitive data structures.

7. Authentication

It may be necessary to restrict access to the descriptions made available via the Presentation API. As the primary means of interaction with the descriptions is by web browsers using XmlHttpRequests across domains, there are some considerations regarding the most appropriate methods for authenticating users and authorizing their access. The approach taken is described in the Authentication specification, and requires requesting a token to add to the requests to identify the user. This token might also be used for other requests defined by other APIs.

It is possible to include Image API service descriptions within the Manifest, and within those it is also possible to include links to the Authentication API’s services that are needed to interact with the image content. The first time an Authentication API service is included within a Manifest, it must be the complete description. Subsequent references should be just the URI of the service, and clients are expected to look up the details from the full description by matching the URI. Clients must anticipate situations where the Authentication service description in the Manifest is out of date: the source of truth is the Image Information document, or other system that references the Authentication API services.

Appendices

A. Summary of Property Requirements

Icon Meaning
required Required
recommended Recommended
optional Optional
not allowed Not Allowed

Descriptive and Rights Properties

  label metadata summary requiredStatement rights navDate language
Collection required recommended recommended optional optional optional not allowed
Manifest required recommended recommended optional optional optional not allowed
Canvas recommended optional optional optional optional optional not allowed
Annotation optional optional optional optional optional not allowed not allowed
AnnotationPage optional optional optional optional optional not allowed not allowed
Range recommended optional optional optional optional optional not allowed
AnnotationCollection recommended optional optional optional optional not allowed not allowed
Content Resources optional optional optional optional optional not allowed recommended
  provider thumbnail placeholderCanvas accompanyingCanvas
Collection recommended recommended optional optional
Manifest recommended recommended optional optional
Canvas optional optional optional* optional*
Annotation optional optional not allowed not allowed
AnnotationPage optional optional not allowed not allowed
Range optional optional optional optional
AnnotationCollection optional optional not allowed not allowed
Content Resources optional optional not allowed not allowed

*A Canvas that is the value of a placeholderCanvas or accompanyingCanvas property may not have either of those properties itself.

Technical Properties

  id type format profile height width duration viewingDirection behavior timeMode
Collection required required not allowed not allowed not allowed not allowed not allowed optional optional not allowed
Manifest required required not allowed not allowed not allowed not allowed not allowed optional optional not allowed
Canvas required required not allowed not allowed optional* optional* optional not allowed optional not allowed
Annotation required required not allowed not allowed not allowed not allowed not allowed not allowed optional optional
Annotation Page required required not allowed not allowed not allowed not allowed not allowed not allowed optional not allowed
Range required required not allowed not allowed not allowed not allowed not allowed optional optional not allowed
Annotation Collection required required not allowed not allowed not allowed not allowed not allowed not allowed optional not allowed
Content Resources required required optional optional optional optional optional not allowed optional not allowed

*If a Canvas has either of height and width, it must have the other, as described in the definitions of those properties.

Linking Properties

  seeAlso service homepage rendering partOf start supplementary services
Collection optional optional optional optional optional not allowed not allowed optional
Manifest optional optional optional optional optional optional not allowed optional
Canvas optional optional optional optional optional not allowed not allowed not allowed
Annotation optional optional optional optional optional not allowed not allowed not allowed
Annotation Page optional optional optional optional optional not allowed not allowed not allowed
Range optional optional optional optional optional optional optional not allowed
Annotation Collection optional optional optional optional optional not allowed not allowed not allowed
Content Resources optional optional optional optional optional not allowed not allowed not allowed

Structural Properties

  items structures annotations
Collection required not allowed optional
Manifest required optional optional
Canvas recommended not allowed optional
Annotation not allowed not allowed not allowed
Annotation Page recommended not allowed not allowed
Range required not allowed optional
Annotation Collection not allowed not allowed not allowed
Content Resources not allowed not allowed optional

Behavior Values

  Collection Manifest Canvas Range
auto-advance optional optional optional optional
continuous optional optional not allowed optional
facing-pages not allowed not allowed optional not allowed
individuals optional optional not allowed optional
multi-part optional not allowed not allowed not allowed
no-auto-advance optional optional optional optional
no-nav not allowed not allowed not allowed optional
no-repeat optional optional not allowed not allowed
non-paged not allowed not allowed optional not allowed
hidden * not allowed not allowed not allowed not allowed
paged optional optional not allowed optional
repeat optional optional not allowed not allowed
sequence not allowed not allowed not allowed optional
thumbnail-nav not allowed not allowed not allowed optional
together optional not allowed not allowed not allowed
unordered optional optional not allowed optional

* hidden is allowed on Annotation Collections, Annotation Pages, Annotations, Specific Resources and Choices, as these are the classes that result in rendering content to the user.

B. Example Manifest Response

{
  "@context": "http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json",
  "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/manifest",
  "type": "Manifest",
  "label": { "en": [ "Book 1" ] },
  "metadata": [
    {
      "label": { "en": [ "Author" ] },
      "value": { "none": [ "Anne Author" ] }
    },
    {
      "label": { "en": [ "Published" ] },
      "value": {
        "en": [ "Paris, circa 1400" ],
        "fr": [ "Paris, environ 1400" ]
      }
    },
    {
      "label": { "en": [ "Notes" ] },
      "value": {
        "en": [
          "Text of note 1",
          "Text of note 2"
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "label": { "en": [ "Source" ] },
      "value": { "none": [ "<span>From: <a href=\"https://example.org/db/1.html\">Some Collection</a></span>" ] }
    }
  ],
  "summary": { "en": [ "Book 1, written be Anne Author, published in Paris around 1400." ] },

  "thumbnail": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/page1/full/80,100/0/default.jpg",
      "type": "Image",
      "format": "image/jpeg",
      "service": [
        {
          "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/page1",
          "type": "ImageService3",
          "profile": "level1"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],

  "viewingDirection": "right-to-left",
  "behavior": [ "paged" ],
  "navDate": "1856-01-01T00:00:00Z",

  "rights": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "requiredStatement": {
    "label": { "en": [ "Attribution" ] },
    "value": { "en": [ "Provided by Example Organization" ] }
  },

  "provider": [
      {
        "id": "https://example.org/about",
        "type": "Agent",
        "label": { "en": [ "Example Organization" ] },
        "homepage": [
          {
            "id": "https://example.org/",
            "type": "Text",
            "label": { "en": [ "Example Organization Homepage" ] },
            "format": "text/html"
          }
        ],
        "logo": [
          {
            "id": "https://example.org/service/inst1/full/max/0/default.png",
            "type": "Image",
            "format": "image/png",
            "service": [
              {
                "id": "https://example.org/service/inst1",
                "type": "ImageService3",
                "profile": "level2"
              }
            ]
          }
        ],
        "seeAlso": [
          {
            "id": "https://data.example.org/about/us.jsonld",
            "type": "Dataset",
            "format": "application/ld+json",
            "profile": "https://schema.org/"
          }
        ]
      }
    ],
  "homepage": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/info/book1/",
      "type": "Text",
      "label": { "en": [ "Home page for Book 1" ] },
      "format": "text/html"
    }
  ],
  "service": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/service/example",
      "type": "ExampleExtensionService",
      "profile": "https://example.org/docs/example-service.html"
    }
  ],
  "seeAlso": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/library/catalog/book1.xml",
      "type": "Dataset",
      "format": "text/xml",
      "profile": "https://example.org/profiles/bibliographic"
    }
  ],
  "rendering": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1.pdf",
      "type": "Text",
      "label": { "en": [ "Download as PDF" ] },
      "format": "application/pdf"
    }
  ],
  "partOf": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/collections/books/",
      "type": "Collection"
    }
  ],
  "start": {
    "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/canvas/p2",
    "type": "Canvas"
  },

  "services": [
    {
      "@id": "https://example.org/iiif/auth/login",
      "@type": "AuthCookieService1",
      "profile": "http://iiif.io/api/auth/1/login",
      "label": "Login to Example Institution",
      "service": [
        {
          "@id": "https://example.org/iiif/auth/token",
          "@type": "AuthTokenService1",
          "profile": "http://iiif.io/api/auth/1/token"          
        }
      ]
    }
  ],

  "items": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/canvas/p1",
      "type": "Canvas",
      "label": { "none": [ "p. 1" ] },
      "height": 1000,
      "width": 750,
      "items": [
        {
          "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/page/p1/1",
          "type": "AnnotationPage",
          "items": [
            {
              "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/annotation/p0001-image",
              "type": "Annotation",
              "motivation": "painting",
              "body": {
                "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/page1/full/max/0/default.jpg",
                "type": "Image",
                "format": "image/jpeg",
                "service": [
                  {
                    "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/page1",
                    "type": "ImageService3",
                    "profile": "level2",
                    "service": [
                      {
                        "@id": "https://example.org/iiif/auth/login",
                        "@type": "AuthCookieService1"
                      }
                    ]
                  }
                ],
                "height": 2000,
                "width": 1500
              },
              "target": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/canvas/p1"
            }
          ]
        }
      ],
      "annotations": [
        {
          "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/comments/p1/1",
          "type": "AnnotationPage"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/canvas/p2",
      "type": "Canvas",
      "label": { "none": [ "p. 2" ] },
      "height": 1000,
      "width": 750,
      "items": [
        {
          "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/page/p2/1",
          "type": "AnnotationPage",
          "items": [
            {
              "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/annotation/p0002-image",
              "type": "Annotation",
              "motivation": "painting",
              "body": {
                "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/page2/full/max/0/default.jpg",
                "type": "Image",
                "format": "image/jpeg",
                "service": [
                  {
                    "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/page2",
                    "type": "ImageService3",
                    "profile": "level2"
                  }
                ],
                "height": 2000,
                "width": 1500
              },
              "target": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/canvas/p2"
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  ],

  "structures": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/range/r0",
      "type": "Range",
      "label": { "en": [ "Table of Contents" ] },
      "items": [
        {
          "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/range/r1",
          "type": "Range",
          "label": { "en": [ "Introduction" ] },
          "supplementary": {
            "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/annocoll/introTexts",
            "type": "AnnotationCollection"
          },
          "items": [
            {
              "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/canvas/p1",
              "type": "Canvas"
            },
            {
              "type": "SpecificResource",
              "source": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/canvas/p2",
              "selector": {
                "type": "FragmentSelector",
                "value": "xywh=0,0,750,300"
              }
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  ],

  "annotations": [
    {
      "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/page/manifest/1",
      "type": "AnnotationPage",
      "items": [
        {
          "id": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/page/manifest/a1",
          "type": "Annotation",
          "motivation": "commenting",
          "body": {
            "type": "TextualBody",
            "language": "en",
            "value": "I love this manifest!"
          },
          "target": "https://example.org/iiif/book1/manifest"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

C. Versioning

Starting with version 2.0, this specification follows Semantic Versioning. See the note Versioning of APIs for details regarding how this is implemented.

D. Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the members of the IIIF community for their continuous engagement, innovative ideas, and feedback.

Many of the changes in this version are due to the work of the IIIF AV Technical Specification Group, chaired by Jason Ronallo (North Carolina State University), Jon Dunn (Indiana University) and Tom Crane (Digirati). The IIIF Community thanks them for their leadership, and the members of the group for their tireless work.

E. Change Log

Date Description
2020-06-03 Version 3.0 (Surfing Raven) View change log
2017-06-09 Version 2.1.1 View change log
2016-05-12 Version 2.1 (Hinty McHintface) View change log
2014-09-11 Version 2.0 (Triumphant Giraffe) View change log
2013-08-26 Version 1.0 (unnamed)
2013-06-14 Version 0.9 (unnamed)